Use external and requires in base type

[hchen]

Hi team, we are getting the following errors when trying to use @ExternalDirective and @RequiresDirective in base type.

com.expediagroup.graphql.generator.federation.exception.InvalidFederatedSchema: Invalid federated schema:
 - base Product type has fields marked with @requires directive, validatedField=shippingEstimate
 - base Product type has fields marked with @external directive, fields=[weight]

We want to caculate shippingEstimate of the Product which relies on the weight field. This weight field is resolved by another subgraph.

I'm wondering why these checks are added and if this can be disabled using a config.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[dariuszkuc]

In general, the expectation was that you should not define @external fields on the base type -> given a type you would extend its functionality in other subgraphs. In your case, you would compute shippingEstimate in the subgraph that calculates the weight. I think that is generally an anti-pattern.

That being said, I think that would still be a valid graph for the composition so we probably should remove this check. Also with the smart type merging introduced in Fed v2, @extends / extend type is no longer necessary so it might be hard to distinguish between base and extended type anyway.