Explore and build your queries faster than ever with the new 8base Explorer!

Just in time for holidays, we're rolling out an exciting new way to explore and build your GraphQL queries in our API Explorer!

With this release, you'll be able to click your way through any part of your API, quickly building powerful queries, mutations, and subscriptions. Below is an example where a parameterized SignUp mutation gets built in just a few seconds.

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It's already live in the 8base dashboard. Try it here!

How does it work under the hood?

For those of you interested in the tech behind the tools, our visual explorer is based on OneGraph's GraphiQL Explorer, with some custom additions and polish so it fits in seamlessly with 8base.

The Explorer analyzes your custom 8base GraphQL schema and builds the visual tree. As you navigate through your API and add/remove fields, the Explorer parses the underlying AST (abstract-syntax tree) to extract the operations you've already built up in the panel, and then adds/removes fields in the query.

All that said, we've put in a lot of deep technical work in order to create the developer experience our users told us they need to be maximally productive!

Why invest so much effort in our API explorer?

To date, 8base has built a platform that:

• Handles your app’s proprietary data with an elegant, infinitely scalable GraphQL API
• Provides configurable authorization and authentication systems for user management
• Wraps everything together in a simple, powerful UI and developer-experience.
  

Each release is the result of our team sitting down with our users, watching them build the apps that power their business, and finding where 8base can give them super-powers. With every release at 8base, we ask ourselves "How will this give our users super-powers?"

Today's release is no different: the visual explorer we've embedded in our API explorer lets you explore, understand, and build one your 8base API faster than ever before.

If you're curious to read more about the motivating use-cases for the new visual explorer, you can read the original post on the OneGraph Blog, check out the improvements in the past few months, or even see a sneak preview of some of the new features currently in the works.

Play with the Explorer!

Many thanks to the OneGraph team who worked with us to make the visual explorer experience smooth for all of our 8base users!