What is the use of globalID?

[shtse8]

in the documentation, there is a globalID when we are using relay plugin. but there is no detailed explanation about the reason why using global id instead of the object id. I am using prisma plugin with prismaConnection and prismaNode. the exposed id using globalid. it makes my application cannot relate to id field because it is not the actual id using in database.

for example,

1. I query posts from graphql with id and url fields selected.
2. url field has custom resolver to resolve: (root) => '/post/' + root.id
3. using the url for navigation.
4. now, the id is database id, it's hard to match up the global id for other endpoints.

I am bit confusing which ID I should use in frontend. global id or database id?
should I build the url using encodeGlobalID to ensure all id on frontend is using global id?

resolve: (root) => {
  const globalId = encodeGlobalID('Post', root.id)
  return '/post/' + globalId
}

it this is the correct way which is a breaking change because all my post urls have changed. also, the globalID is terrible long and not good for frontend.

[hayes]

Global IDs are a concept from relay. The idea is to create an id that can be resolved to a specific node without additional context. In practice this usually means a global is encoded as a combination of the type name and a unique ID. This is primarily used by the node and nodes fields. These fields accept global IDs and return the corresponding nodes. The relay client uses this for directly fetching specific nodes. Most commonly this is done when loading a new page of a connection. If a connection isn't a root query field, it is assumed to be more efficient to directly reload the parent object of the connection (assuming it is a relay node) and use that to query another page of th connection, than it would be to re-create the entire original query with all of its nested selections.

Global IDs can be useful if you want to expose IDs that can be used with the node/nodes fields. You can also create globalID arguments that Pothos decodes automatically instead of using an id argument and manually deciding it.