Saturday, 13 October, 2018 UTC


Summary

This tutorial is a part of the ยซ NextJS, Strapi, GraphQL, Stripe Deliveroo clone (Part 2/7 - Restaurant List)(Vue.js), GraphQL, Strapi and Stripe tutorial series ยป:
Table of contents
  • ๐Ÿ—๏ธ Setup (part 1)
  • ๐Ÿ  Restaurants (part 2) - current
  • ๐Ÿ” Dishes (part 3)
  • ๐Ÿ” Authentication (part 4)
  • ๐Ÿ›’ Shopping Card (part 5)
  • ๐Ÿ’ต Order and Checkout (part 6)
  • ๐Ÿš€ Bonus: Deploy (part 7)
  • ๐Ÿ‘ Conclusion
*Note: the source code is available on GitHub:
https://github.com/ryanbelke/strapi-next
๐Ÿ  Restaurants list
First of all, we need to display the list of restaurants in our web app. Of course, this list is going to be managed through our API. So, we are going to start configuring it.

Define Content Type

A Content Type, also called a model, is a type of data. A Strapi API includes, by default, the user Content Type. Right now, we need restaurants, so our new Content Type is going to be, as you already guessed, restaurant (Content Types are always singular).
Here are the required steps:
  • Navigate to the Content Type Builder (http://localhost:1337/admin/plugins/content-type-builder).
  • Click on Add Content Type.
  • Set restaurant as name.
  • Click on Add New Field and create the followings fields:
    • name with type String.
    • description with type Text with Rich Text Editor (in the Advanced Settings section of the modal, select Display as a WYSIWYG).
    • image with type Media.
  • Click on Save.
At this point, your server should have automatically restarted and a new link Restaurant appears in the left menu.

Add some entries

Well done! You created your first Content Type. The next step is to add some restaurants in your database. To do so, click on "Restaurant" in the left menu (http://localhost:1337/admin/plugins/content-manager/restaurant).
You are now in the Content Manager plugin: an auto-generated user interface which let you see and edit entries.
Let's create a restaurant:
  • Click on Add New Restaurant.
  • Give it a name, a description and drop an image.
  • Save it.
Create as many restaurants as you would like to see in your apps.

Allow access

Having the items in database is great. Being able to request them from an API is even better. As you already know, Strapi's mission is to create API (I have got a super secret anecdote for you: its name is coming from Bootstrap your API ๐Ÿ˜ฎ).
When you were creating your restaurant Content Type, Strapi created, behind the scene, a few set of files located in api/restaurant. These files include the logic to expose a fully customisable CRUD API. The find route is available at http://localhost:1337/restaurant. Try to visit this URL and will be surprised to be blocked by a 403 forbidden error. This is actually totally normal: Strapi APIs are secured by design.
Don't worry, making this route accessible is actually super intuitive:
  • Navigate to the Roles & Permissions section of the admin plugin (http://localhost:1337/admin/plugins/users-permissions).
  • Click on the Public role.
  • Tick the find and findone checkboxes of the Restaurant section.
  • Save.
Important: do the same thing for the authenticated role.
Now go back to http://localhost:1337/restaurant: at this point, you should be able to see your list of restaurants.

Enabling GraphQL

By default, API generated withย Strapi are best on REST conventions. What if I would tell you that you could transform them into GraphQL within 10 seconds?
Well, let me prove you that.
A GraphQL plugin, which will make all the work for you, is available for Strapi. Install it with the Strapi CLI:
strapi install graphql  
Or click "Marketplace" on your admin dashboard and select GraphQL
And that's it, you are done.
Note: The GraphQL playground is currently not working with a new install. When I started writing the tutorial the playground worked but with a recent dependency update mid-writing the playground stopped working (may be fixed in the future so I am leaving this here for future reference if the Strapi team is able to fix the playground)

Restart your server, go to http://localhost:1337/playground and try this query:
{
  restaurants {
    _id
    name
  }
}

Display restaurants

It looks you are going to the right direction. What if we would display these restaurants in our Next app?
Install Apollo:
yarn add react-apollo next-apollo graphql gql recompose
To connect our application with GraphQL we will use Apollo and the next-apollo implementation to wrap our components in a withData HOC to give them access to make apollo data queries.
There are a couple differnt approaches to implementing GraphQL into a Nextjs app, the approach we will take is extracting the Apollo logic into lib file and wrapping our components with a Higher Order Component called withData to handle the GQL queries inside each respective components.
Example repo detailing the Apollo Next implementation:
https://github.com/adamsoffer/next-apollo-example
Create a lib directory in the root of the project:
mkdir lib  
cd lib  
touch apollo.js  

We will generate the list of Restaurants inside a RestaurantList file as:
cd ..  
cd components  
mkdir Restaurants  
cd Restaurants  
mkdir RestaurantList  
cd RestaurantList  
touch index.js  
Route: /components/RestaurantList/index.js
Now update your /pages/index.js home route to display the Restaurant list:
Route: /pages/index.js
We will need to update our _app.js file to wrap our application with the Apollo Provider that will enable GraphQL to make queries:
/pages/_app.js
Important:

Downgrage graphql-js dependency

With the current implementation you will receive a GraphQL error:
message: "ID cannot represent value: { _bsontype: "ObjectID", id: }"
This is caused by a breaking change in the graphql-js update on how the ID's from a MongoDB are serialized:
https://github.com/graphql/graphql-js/issues/1518
Based on the comments it looks like the maintainers are working on a fix but as of the time of writing (10/12/2018) the fix is to downgrade your graphql package to:
GraphQL 0.13.2
The dependency package is in the /server folder under the GraphQL plugin folder listed at:
/server/plugins/graphql/
cd server/plugins  
cd graphql  
npm install [email protected] --save  
Inside of your packages.json file your graphql dependency should be listed as "graphql": "0.13.2"
* until the issue is fixed if you upgrade your packages inside the server you will break the implementation *
Now you should see the list of restaurants on the page
Well done!
๐Ÿ” In the next section, you will learn how to display the list of dishes: https://blog.strapi.io/strapi-next-dishes.