Understanding the basic rules of federation

At the time of writing this book, there are no official federation specifications; however, there are some rules that are common across the different federation solutions available. Let’s go through these rules in a question-and-answer format.

How do you merge different types?

Merging types with different type names results in a schema with all the types. So, let’s say that in one schema you have an Animal type:

type Animal{
  name: String!
}

And in the other schema, you have a Car type:

type Car {
  name: String!
}

Then the resulting merged schema will include both:

type Animal{
  name: String!
}
type Car {
  name: String!
}

To simulate how schemas are merged with the federation process, we will use a small script from the GitHub chapter repository. Follow these steps:

1. Clone the book repository and enter the chapter-07 folder inside your IDE command line...