Optional parameters in DQL (search) query

Users Dgraph
1

I have two questions.

  1. How can I use optional parameters.
  2. If i can use optional parameters, is the following use case a good practice?

For my example I use the following simplified schema.

# A recipe can be easy or hard for example.
type Difficulty {
    name: String! @id
    recipes: [Recipe!]!
}

type Recipe {
    slug: String! @id
    title: String! @search(by: [fulltext])
    difficulty: Difficulty! @hasInverse(field: recipes)
}

I created a DQL query that allows me to find the recipe by the difficulty and a text search on the title:

query q($difficulty: string, $recipeTitle: string){
   var(func: eq(Difficulty.name, $difficulty)){
                Difficulty.recipes {
                    RecipeIds as uid
                }
            }
            
            queryRecipeByTitleAndDifficulty(func :uid(RecipeIds)) @filter(anyoftext(Recipe.title,$recipeTitle)){
                id: uid
                title: Recipe.title
            }
}

This works. However, if I don’t give the query a $difficulty or $recipeTitle, it will error. And if I leave these fields blank it will return an empty array. Is there a way I can change my query to allow me to search for recipes and filter the recipes whether I enter both a title and a difficulty or leave one empty.

One of my solutions is to create a query for all the cases. A query for only filtering by title, only filtering by difficulty and filtering by both difficulty and title. But what if I want to add a ‘cuisine’ field on recipe to filter by. In that case I would have to add more queries for each case and this will become really cumbersome.

(1) How must I change my query to allow me to get filtered results whether I provide all fields or leave one blank.

(2) And if this is possible should I do this or should I rather be using a search Database for this use case.

Thank you in advance

2

You could try using the Default value. e.g:

query q($difficulty: string = "empty", $recipeTitle: string = "value")

If you send a query with empty vars, it will use the default one.