Building large queries takes a long time and pauses the UI

[hephaistos-official]

In my use-case I've got a few fairly large SelectionSets (>1 MB when serialized to string as part of a HTTP POST) and when I try an do a query that has six similarly large SelectionSets the UI entirely pauses for a few seconds. Having profiled this, it appears that the cause of this is the Graphql.Document.serializeQuery function.

Is there a way to do the query serialization in a way where it doesn't pause the UI? Alternatively, since the SelectionSet doesn't change in my case, is there a way to "cache" the serialized query and use it the next time rather than having to re-serialize it every time?

[dillonkearns]

You can use the low-level functions https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/dillonkearns/elm-graphql/latest/Graphql-Document#serializeQuery to manage serializing the query and caching the query string and https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/dillonkearns/elm-graphql/latest/Graphql-Document#decoder to get the decoder from it.

I'd welcome a PR with performance optimizations to Graphql.Document.serializeQuery if you're interested in experimenting with that. There's a pretty robust test suite around it so there might be some low-hanging fruit there, and you can get a pretty good feedback cycle to experiment with things with those tests running.

[hephaistos-official]

Thanks for the reply, and (I should've mentioned this in the original comment) this wonderful graphql client library!

Using serializeQuery seems to do the trick, but while exploring that API I noticed that all the functions deal with RootQuery and RootMutation, and there isn't a way to serialize with placeholder GraphQL variables (eg. $ids). So, right now I still have to re-serialize when my variables change.

Is there a way to serialize SelectionSets with non-root Scopes? and, is there a way to specify GraphQL variables when serializing so I can reuse the resultant string with many different variables?