AutoMapper VS GraphQL for .NET

AutoMapper

The 13.0 Upgrade Guide page was created back in April, but there is no sign of the release yet.

The most well-know is probably AutoMapper, but it's not universally liked.

AutoMapper - well for automapping

When working with AutoMapper, we often bump into runtime errors due to invalid mapping configuration, such as this one:

What problems will resolve automapper?

If you are a fan of data mappers, you might want to enhance the implementation with additional extension methods. Here is an example for AutoMapper.

I'm wondering myself. Most mappers like https://automapper.org/ will make a best effort mapper automatically via introspection. If this is just a DSL/annotation suite that requires explicit, complete mapping implementations then this strikes me as a re-implementation of parts of kotlin in kotlin.

The way that’s done in Visualizer is quite specific to my needs and to the library that I’m using, called GraphQl-Dotnet.

I'm starting a brand new project. Looks like if we want to do GraphQL in .NET, it's either graphql-dotnet or Hot Chocolate. Both look pretty good on paper.

This is a template API using Clean Architecture alongside a .net implementation of GraphQL.

Customising the default ParallelExecutionStrategy is harder though. The best way to achieve this is to take the existing source code and modify it. The key section we need to modify is the last part of the try/catch in ExecuteNodeTreeAsync:

Because it can depend on the context. I know the PHP Laravel integration for GraphQL I used was leveraging the Carbon interface instead of PHP's native Date type. In NestJS the integrated solution allows you to choose whether to use UNIX timestamps or ISO datetimes. TypeGraphQL does something similar if I'm not wrong, and the .NET library added a bunch of date-related scalars in a PR they made for v2.

If you're loving your current stack, you should stick with it :) But, if you're experiencing some of the problems described in the article, you might want to try Apollo. It's incrementally adoptable, so you don't have to rewrite your whole app to start using it. There's also a community maintained .NET implementation of GraphQL, so you could use that for your graph and use Apollo Client to connect it to the frontend.