Concepts

This page covers key architectural and functional concepts behind tfce-graphql. Understanding these foundational elements will help you write performant and scalable queries using this tool.

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Parallelization

tfce-graphql employs intelligent parallelization to accelerate data fetching while maintaining control over concurrency. This is essential when interfacing with APIs like HCP Terraform and TFE, which can become bottlenecked by sequential requests.

Concurrency Control

Parallelization is governed by the applicationConfiguration.graphqlBatchSize parameter, which defines the maximum number of in-flight operations at any given time. This ensures we maintain high throughput without overwhelming the API or excessive rate limiting.

Concurrency Utilities

Two framework level functions exist to assist:

• parallelizeBounded: Runs operations concurrently with a concurrency cap.
• streamPages: Streams paginated API resources item-by-item.

Benefits

• Faster data aggregation
• Non-blocking resolution of large collections
• Efficient use of bandwidth and client compute resources

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Pagination

Most Terraform API endpoints implement pagination. To support seamless traversal, tfce-graphql provides pagination-aware data source utilities that can stream results across pages.

Streaming Pages

The streamPages utility abstracts away manual pagination handling. It lazily yields items one-by-one using a for await...of loop, transparently fetching the next page when needed.

Example:

const httpClient = context.httpClient;

for await (const workspace of streamPages(
  httpClient,
  (page) => this.getWorkspacesPage(page),
)) {
  // Handle workspace
}

Benefits

• Works well with large datasets
• Avoids exhausting memory
• Works naturally with GraphQL resolvers that expect streams

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Rate Limiting

Rate limits are a fundamental reality of working with APIs like HCP Terraform and TFE. tfce-graphql implements client-side protection to avoid abuse and maximize throughput.

Mechanisms

• 429 handling: When the API returns HTTP 429, we respect Retry-After or X-RateLimit-Reset headers and back off (capped at 60s). Retries are limited by TFGQL_RATE_LIMIT_MAX_RETRIES (default 50).
• 5xx handling: For idempotent GETs (and safe non-mutation POSTs), we retry server errors with a fixed delay between attempts, controlled by TFGQL_SERVER_ERROR_MAX_RETRIES and TFGQL_SERVER_ERROR_RETRY_DELAY.

Responsible Client Behavior

By handling rate limits gracefully, we avoid:

• Getting blocked
• Triggering API-wide slowdowns
• Losing reliability in long-running processes

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Entity Graph

Unlike RESTful systems where objects are queried independently, tfce-graphql exposes the entire Terraform Enterprise/HCP domain model as an entity graph.

Resolver Design

Each entity (e.g., organizations, teams, workspaces, etc.) has its own resolver layer that manages:

• Data fetching
• Relationship resolution
• Filtering logic

Resolvers are registered using a registerResolver utility that enables nested querying across relationships.

Relationship Chaining

For example, this query walks the graph from organizations to teams to users:

query {
  organizations {
    teams {
      users {
        username
      }
    }
  }
}

This pattern enables expressive, deeply nested queries that mirror how users actually work with Terraform resources.

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Request-Level Cache

To support high-performance querying and avoid redundant fetches, tfce-graphql uses a request-level cache.

Features

• Shared across resolvers for a single query execution
• Keyed with stable strings that include all parameters that affect results
• Supports async resolution with in-flight de-duplication (the first call populates the cache; concurrent calls await it)

This cache enables deduplication of operations like:

• Fetching the same user multiple times in a single request
• Resolving an entity once for where and again for query
• Resolving Explorer workspace rows where multiple Explorer views reference the same workspace, project, or run by name

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Filter Clause

Applies filters to the current entity. This is applied synchronously using scalar attributes (e.g., username, id, etc).

users(filter: { username: { _eq: "alice" } }) {
  id
  username
}

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Multi-Organization Selection

Several top-level queries (e.g., workspaces, projects, teams, policySets) accept optional includeOrgs and excludeOrgs arguments to fan out across multiple organizations in a single request. The resolver follows these precedence rules:

• If includeOrgs is omitted or an empty array, all organizations the caller can access are considered.
• Entries listed in excludeOrgs are removed from the final set, even if they were implicitly included by the rule above.
• When the same organization appears in both arrays, the exclusion wins and that organization is skipped.

For example, to query every workspace except those in legacy-org:

query {
  workspaces(includeOrgs: [], excludeOrgs: ["legacy-org"]) {
    id
    name
  }
}

Passing an empty array for includeOrgs is a helpful shorthand when you want “all my orgs except...”.

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Strongly Typed Filtering

Each entity has a corresponding *Filter type, and those are recursively composed.

Example:

input TeamFilter {
  name: StringComparisonExp
  users: UserFilter
}

This allows for expressive, nested filtering.

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Terraform Version Filtering

Filtering supports semantic version comparisons on Terraform versions. Use the TerraformVersionComparisonExp operators (_gt, _gte, _lt, _lte, _eq, _neq, _in, _nin) for fields that contain Terraform versions (e.g., workspace.terraformVersion).

Example:

workspaces(includeOrgs: ["my-org1"], filter: { terraformVersion: { _gte: "1.6.0" }}) {
  id
  name
  terraformVersion
}

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Logging & Tracing

All logs are structured via Pino and include trace_id and span_id for correlation across services.

• Incoming requests parse the W3C traceparent header (or generate one if absent).
• The same traceparent value is used as x-request-id.
• Outbound HTTP calls add traceparent and x-request-id headers automatically.
• The log context is bound per request using AsyncLocalStorage, so logs from any module are correctly correlated.

Configuration:

• LOG_LEVEL controls verbosity (fatal, error, warn, info, debug, trace). Default is info.
• NODE_ENV=development enables prettified, single-line, colorized logs via pino-pretty.