Using Grafbase to get Airplane task output as a GraphQL API

Introduction

This is an example on how to send output from an Airplane task to Grafbase. The published task output is then available as a GraphQL API that could be consumed by a webapp or used in Airplane.

Workflow overview

This is a hypothetical internal tool for a GDPR right of access request procedure. It works like this.

1. Data subject sends a request to get their data by email, fax or post.

2. Company employee inputs User ID of data subject in the gdpr_report task (Typescript task).

3. The gdpr_report task calls fetch_report task (SQL task) to search systems for personal data of the data subject.

4. The output of fetch_report is used as input in the result_to_grafbase task (GraphQL task) that writes the data to Grafbase using a GraphQL mutation.

5. The output is now available as a Grafbase GraphQL endpoint. The data subject is then mailed a link to a webpage that uses the endpoint as a backend to show the personal data. (Note: Neither email functionality or webpage for viewing data is included in this repository.)

How to run

1. Fork this repository to your own Github account

2. On grafbase.com, create a new project and import the forked repository.

3. Your new project should now start deploying. In the meantime you can click the "Connect" button in your project overview and have a look at the JavaScript example. There are two headers there we want to use in Airplane when we set up Grafbase as a resource, content-type and x-api-key.

4. In Airplane go to Settings -> Resources and add a new GraphQL resource. The "Base URL" should be set to the URL you see under "Endpoint" in the Grafbase project overview. You also need to add the two headers from the JavaScript example, content-type and x-api-key. "Authentication" should be set to None.

5. Edit result_to_grafbase.task.yaml to use the GraphQL resource you just created

   graphql:
       resource: YOUR_GRAPHQL_RESOURCE_SLUG
   

6. Edit the sql task in fetch_report.task.yaml to use one an sql resource.

   sql:
       resource: YOUR_SQL_RESOURCE_SLUG
   

7. Change fetch_report.sql into an sql query that will work with your sql resource. The actual columns or data does not matter but keep it to a reasonable size.

8. Deploy to Airplane with the airplay CLI. airplane deploy *

9. In the Airplane UI, run the gdpr_report task.