Use GraphQL While Mobile and Offline

Developers like GraphQL for modern web applications because, in contrast to many REST and CRUD-oriented APIs, GraphQL allows for expressive queries, with features like filtering and scopes, ordering and aggregation, pagination, and relationship traversal to related records. A single query can retrieve many records, and even records of multiple types. Using fewer queries reduces the number of server requests required to load data, which can improve performance. A GQL query can specify precisely and only the fields required for a given component, reducing the amount of data that needs to be transmitted before a page can render.

Salesforce offers several different implementations of GraphQL for use in your apps. Each implementation has an intended context and purpose, and relevant use cases. Learning to use the appropriate implementation, or when you must use a specific implementation, is straightforward. See Understand Salesforce GraphQL Implementations.

For mobile developers building apps that work while offline, however, there is only one implementation that matters: Offline GraphQL. The rest of this chapter provides details of using Offline GraphQL, including important considerations and limitations.