Smart tag to shortcut accessing an attribute from a related table

[benjie]

Feature request via Discord, essentially @ref but for attributes rather than whole tables.

From https://discord.com/channels/489127045289476126/1232250825125134400/1232250825125134400:

Discord question

I have a table, let's call it person (id, name) and a view, let's call it person_address (person_id, address_calculated_in_view). Both of them are related via a foreign key (i.e. id on person <> person_id on person_address), but note that this is NOT a materialized view, so there's no indexes on person_address.

Now with the @ref smart tag, I believe I would be able to "join" those so that in graphql I would get

person {
  personAddress {
    addressCalculatedInView
  }
}

And that is great - however, what I would actually need, is a way to get

person {
  addressCalculatedInView
}

Right now, what I do for this, is define a function

person_address_calculated_in_view(p person)
  SELECT address_calculated_in_view FROM person_address WHERE person_address.person_id = p.id

Unfortunately though, this is significantly more expensive to run than a simple join. While for my data the function takes ~5ms to execute, it'll take 5ms PER row in person, which becomes very slow very fast.
Ideally, I would like to be able to specify a @ref to a single field, such that graphile can just join the view to the base table.

Is there curerntly a way to do this for me? If not, what would be the best way forward to get this - can the @ref tag somehow be extended via plugins maybe?
Thanks in advance for any pointers!

Benjie's Discord response

Interesting idea. @ref would not be the right smart tag for this, we'd need a new one (e.g. @refColumn) but it's definitely feasible. You should file an issue about it. In the mean time, I would personally solve this via a makeExtendSchemaPlugin, something like:

export const MyPlugin = makeExtendSchemaPlugin(build => {
  return {
    typeDefs: gql`extend type Person { addressCalculatedInView: String }`,
    plans: {
      Person: {
        addressCalculatedInView($person) {
          const $view = $pgSelectSingle.sinleRelation('relationNameHere');
          // OR: const $view = build.input.pgRegistry.pgResources.person_address.get({ person_id: $person.get('id') });
          return $view.get('address_calculated_in_view');
        }
      }
    }
  }
});