Ability to access reverse relations within entry query in GQL

[andrewfairlie]

It would be really useful if when querying entries in GraphQL you could get reverse related elements to that entry, which would avoid you having to do multiple GraphQL calls of "get the entry ID, and then run another GraphQL query with relatedTo() because this can quickly add up and become clunky.

Original comment from other thread

Just a thought, and apologies if this was covered in other thoughts above and I misunderstood, would a good syntax for this be something like relatedEntries, relatedAssets etc. which behave like a normal entries / asset loop but with the relatedTo pre-populated with the current entry. So you could do things like this very weird, but hopefully useful example...?

entry(section:"offices",slug:"london"){
   title,
   id,
   ... on offices_offices_entry {
      peopleInThisOffice: relatedEntries(section:"people"){
        title
      }
      facilitiesInThisOffice: relatedEntries(section:"facilities"){
        title
      }
      imagesTaggedInThisOffice: relatedAssets(source:"images"){
        title
      }
   }
}

Originally posted by @andrewfairlie in #5143 (comment)

[andris-sevcenko]

This has been added for Craft 3.6

[andris-sevcenko]

Well, in its own branch for now.

[brandonkelly]

Merged now. Note that it’s relatedToEntries, etc., not relatedEntries.

[brandonkelly]

Craft 3.6 RC2 is out now with these new GraphQL arguments.

[brandonkelly]

Craft 3.6 has now been officially released ✨

[membla]

Just had a conversation on Discord with @andris-sevcenko on this – the actual issue at hand here is not resolved and even if it may not be feasible to do it in the GraphQL API without changes to the Element Query API or Element itself I think the issue should be reopened because the use case is very valid (and well explained in the original post above).

[brandonkelly]

Whoops, you’re right @membla. Guess we were on a different brainwave. We’re considering how to best address this.

[wbrowar]

I just wanted to throw some extra support behind this FR. I keep running into places where I do one query to get a URI, just to pass that single URI into a second relatedToEntries query. I've tried pre-loading all of my related content, but that means pulling in extra data and then doing the relations in JavaScript, which defeats the benefit of having a good relation system in Craft.

Having custom directives like the ones noted above would be a big boost to SPA performance and reduce static generated build times, so I'm really hoping to see this get added. Happy to help with testing or coming up with the approach to this.

[ctigelaar]

Since a milestone 4.0 tag was added back to the original issue in Feb 2021, I was really looking forward to the release of Craft 4 that would address this problem. I've checked out Craft 4 since it's release, but I still can't query the data of reverse relations unfortunately, or I'm missing something.

What are the plans with this issue? The GraphQL interface is really lacking functionality here. I already had several cases where I needed to skip functionality because I simply can't get the related data based on the selection in the CMS. Even matching two sets of data is not possible, since no output of reverse relations is available at all. In the end what is the point of creating relations in the CMS if we can't use them in our applications?

Looking forward to an update that would address this. Or in case it's already possible I would be happy with a how-to guide. Thanks!

[brandonkelly]

The relatedToEntries (et al.) params will search both ways (forward and reverse), which should generally work for you unless you have two sections that each have different Entries fields pointing at each other.

[ctigelaar]

Thanks for your quick reply Brandon. I know I can narrow down my entries based on relatedToEntries, but that is not what I need.

1. Let's say I have two sections organisations and locations. In an organisation I have a organisationLocations entries selection field, which allows selection from the locations section.
2. I want a list of all locations based on a search in organisations. So I use an entries() on section locations with a relatedToEntries argument with a search in organisations. So far so good, I'm getting the list of locations.
3. But the entries() is returning me results of locations, that's correct, but there is no way to get the reverse related entries from organisations here, is there?
4. That's the key piece I'm missing. I hear you thinking: "you can query with entries() for organisations initially, then you have all the data you need." But that would give me a list of organisations with their locations in the organisationLocations field, instead of a list of locations with their organisations. It matters, because it also affects pagination. I need to paginate on the locations, not on the organisations.

I hope I made usecase more clear. It seems like all ingredients are available in the CMS/database. And maybe I'm still overlooking some built-in functionality here, but please let me know then. Thanks.

[brandonkelly]

Yeah currently that would require an additional query for each resulting location, which I understand isn’t ideal.

It seems like all ingredients are available in the CMS/database.

Not really, which is the reason this isn’t resolved yet. Craft doesn’t have any way to reference/eager-load reverse relations currently. See #8424 for the discussion on that.