Render news articles using GraphQL

[brucebolt]

This switches the rendering of news articles to use Publishing API's GraphQL endpoint, only when the feature flag is enabled.

The code here (and in the associated Publishing API PR: alphagov/publishing-api#3008) has been written in such a way that the least number of changes have been needed in this app, as this is only a proof of concept for now. If we decide to use GraphQL for everything going forward, we should revisit the structure of content returned by GraphQL.

Also note that GraphQL powered queries rely on an initial request to Content Store, since we need to know the content type before deciding whether to use GraphQL.

Furthermore it only renders one level of parent taxon. We will have follow-up work to change how the taxonomy is presented by GraphQL, as it's recursive nature doesn't fit the current implementation.

Trello card

[yndajas]

thought: two requests issue

I suppose if we were to switch over to GraphQL for everything, we might be able to remove the schema name query and do what I suggested in the meeting with Richard and Martyn: have a single big query that specifies what we want for each type using the ...Type syntax. We'd have to weigh up whether one big query is better than one very small one and then the normal schema-specific one

I think this could work with both the current more strongly typed implementation and the Edition god type alternative. With the latter, we could have types that don't themselves define any fields but do at least map document types to GraphQL types, like you've already done for news articles: https://github.com/alphagov/publishing-api/blob/main/app/graphql/types/news_article_type.rb. Then whichever ...Type section of the query matches would be executed

[JonathanHallam]

Would it be gross to change this to just be

 @content_item = use_graphql? ? load_content_item_from_graphql : load_content_item_from_content_store

and then at the top of the load_content_item_from_graphql method we call a new method that checks for the content type and either carries on using graphql or just returns load_content_item_from_content_store

I know that it hides a bit of functionality but it would make this bit of code look nicer

[brucebolt]

I've reduced this down to one GraphQL query now. We'll need to think about the query a bit more once any changes to the typing in Publishing API have been made and when we add GraphQL support for further document types rendered by Government Frontend.

[JonathanHallam]

Thanks Bruce

[catalinailie]

Looks good to me