Dgraph Schema - Custom Properties?

[anand (Anand Chandrashekar)]

Welcome @mgroberts,

@mgroberts

For example we might have a person type with a first name, last name etc. and they want to record the date of birth as well. So they can go to a form, create a field that’s a date time and submit their request and then the web server / api checks that’s all fine and make that request to the database.

We can add fields dynamically. The client apis support alter commands.

@mgroberts

Now the fields they’re creating themselves might have “custom properties” for its own uses, which aren’t part of the core dgraph schema e.g. I know we can store data in multiple languages in dgraph, but what about storing the name of the field “first name” in multiple languages? what about if I want to store custom flags for the field, for example, which user groups have permission to modify it etc.

The predicate definition in Dgraph does not directly support addition of metadata. By extension, the query language also does not have any metadata flex. However, you could name your predicates with a url like syntax your-business/firstName. You could then make this url text point to metadata, either as a simple node in Dgraph itself or some other service. There is no way to dynamically “join” this information at runtime from Dgraph directly, but clients can query this metadata and construct queries accordingly.