Hire the author: Bijita K
Highly committed and reliable software developer with experience in Django.
Introduction
In this article, we’ll be discussing how to structure a GraphQL multipart form query on Postman. For this purpose, we’ll be creating the GraphQL API in a Django project. Tools/libraries used for structuring a GraphQL multipart form query:
- Postman – It is an API platform for testing our multipart form query request.
- graphene – It is a Python library for building GraphQL schemas/types fast and easily.
- graphene-Django – It is a Django integration of graphene.
- graphene-file-upload – It enables multi-part file uploading in our API.
Here is the link to code.
Glossary
Multipart/form-data: It is used in form elements with a file upload. Additionally, it means form data divides into multiple parts and sends it to the server.
API: The messenger that allows two applications to talk to each other and send data to each other.
Implementation
Step 1: Setting up the GraphQL API in the Django project for structuring a multipart form query
In the Django app we will set up a GraphQL API by following the steps given below:
Create a new model in models.py
Additionally, install the libraries required for the project.
pip install graphene
pip install graphene-django
pip install graphene-file-upload
Also, we need to insert ‘graphene_django’ under INSTALLED_APPS inside settings.py.
Create a new file types.py inside the Django app
DjangoObjectType is used to change our Django object into a format that is known and can be used by GraphQL. We use this process for our model named ‘Post’ so that the data will be able to be used by GraphQL.
Create a new file query.py inside the Django app
We are creating a query that can be used for reading the data from the database. However, we cannot edit data using a query only thus we need a mutation for the multipart form query.
Create a new file mutations.py inside the Django app
We have created a mutation that will help us create a post with fields title, photo, and caption. Moreover, we have used the graphene_file_upload library to be able to upload the photo.
Create a new file schema.py inside your Django app
This file will define our GraphQL schema.
Edit the app’s urls.py file to be like the one given below.
Note: csrf_exempt shouldn’t be used for production and is currently used only for development purposes.
Step 2: Structuring the multipart form query on Postman
We will be structuring the multipart form in the following format.

As we can see above there are three main parameters. They are operations, map, and 0.
Operations: To explain, the value of query consists of the query mutation and we use the variable’s key-value pair to assign values except for the photo field.
Map: Its value contains a mapping to the photo variable that was mentioned in operations.
{"0": ["variables.photo"]}
0: Its value contains the photo that needs to be uploaded.
Finally, the request is now ready to be sent. Consequently, its response should show that the post was created and its id will be returned. This completes the whole process of sending the data. We can also carry out this structure in other API platforms like Insomnia in a similar way as shown above. You can check out the whole project here.
Learning Tools
We can use the following links as learning tools for this project.
- https://docs.graphene-python.org/projects/django/en/latest/
- https://github.com/lmcgartland/graphene-file-upload
Learning Strategies
The graphene-Django documentation is good for understanding a lot of the concepts. Similarly, it also includes tutorials that will help to learn about this topic in more detail.
Furthermore, we can learn by observing the large-scale GraphQL Django implementation in the saelor project. This project is maintained well and therefore can be used as a good reference.
Reflective Analysis
The process of working on this project provided me with more clarity in terms of understanding the whole process of GraphQL implementation in Django. Furthermore, it helped me to learn more about multipart-form query structure and how we can send it using Postman.
Conclusions and Future Directions
In conclusion, photos can be uploaded to our application by using the method shown above since GraphQL in Django doesn’t have a built-in way to do that yet. We can extend this project to accept other file types as well. We can further add more endpoints so that this can be turned into a proper application. This project can also be extended further by creating a frontend. You can find the GitHub repository of this project here for a more detailed view.
You can try out creating the frontend for this using React. In fact, you can learn from the blogs How to create a Quiz app using React, Material UI & Heroku, and How to create a cryptocurrency app using React. Here is the code
Citations
- https://github.com/facebook/graphql/blob/master/resources/GraphQL%20Logo.svg
- https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52850866
Highly committed and reliable software developer with good experience in Django.
The blog article is clear and precise.
This can be used to save bandwidth and reduce waterfall requests since it lets you ask for what you want in a single query and also enables you to request your own unique data specifications.