Do operationHeaders have to be pre-defined?

[wcraig02]

I am currently working on setting up my .meshrc to connect to an external graphql project. Currently, in order to connect to this, my UI pushes around a dozen headers (Authorization: Bearer XYZ, etc.).

This leads to my question - in the 'operationHeaders', even when hardcoding valid headers, I am receiving the following error:

unable to start GraphQL Mesh: invalid json response body at http://localhost/graphql reason: Unexpected 'I'

which is just HTML being returned from the server that says 'Invalid Http Header' - aka, invalid headers passed in my operationHeaders.

However, this works just fine if I hardcode valid headers into schemaHeaders. The problem is, I don't want to hardcode these values! I want to pass them from the client, but it seems GraphQL Mesh won't even start up without them.

Am I using mesh wrong? Can this be used to simply spin up a conduit for the UI to pass authorization? Or does the mesh configuration need to be able to authorize with the external graphql server itself?

[ardatan]

You can pass them from the client like below. As in described in our docs;

operationHeaders:
 Authorization: Bearer {context.headers['x-my-token']}

Then x-my-token header will be passed to there.

[ardatan]

It depends on your server configuration. It seems your server needs API Keys or sth even for introspection. That means Mesh needs to send an introspection query to your server before building the schema. So you need API Key for this query for sure. :) To sum up, you need to have API keys and stuff at bootstrap.

I am not sure if you have checked the link; you can use introspection cache feature like below;

operationHeaders:
 Authorization: Bearer ${MY_API_TOKEN}

And you can run mesh write-introspection-cache only once with MY_API_TOKEN env variable then you don't need it on mesh serve later because Mesh would already have that schema cached in introspection cache :)

[mnlbox]

@ardatan the link you mentioned here is not exist anymore. Can you provide the new URL for this part of the docs, please?
https://www.graphql-mesh.com/docs/recipes/introspection-cache
I really need to read more in detail about this feature.
I already read the docs below but there was no description for mesh write-introspection-cache command there:
https://the-guild.dev/graphql/mesh/docs/guides/headers#schemaheaders

[ardatan]

It is an old API. Now we have mesh build command for the artifacts.
https://the-guild.dev/graphql/mesh/docs/cli-commands

[mnlbox]

So the build command is writing the introspection to cache somehow to reuse that for future calls, right?

[ardatan]

Yes