Frequently Asked Questions

Product Information

What is Hygraph?

Hygraph is a GraphQL-native headless content management system (CMS) designed to unify data and enable content federation. It empowers businesses to create impactful digital experiences by removing traditional content management pain points and offering scalability, flexibility, and efficient data querying. Learn more about Hygraph.

How does Hygraph work with Relay?

Hygraph supports Relay out of the box, allowing you to use Relay's features such as pagination, fragments, and data consistency without any special configuration. Hygraph implements the required node interface, pagination filters, and generated connection types, so you can plug any Hygraph API into a Relay project and start working immediately. For a practical example, see the Relay Pizza Demo repository and live demo.

What is Relay and how does it benefit developers?

Relay is a JavaScript framework for building data-driven React applications. It provides features like an Environment constructor, network layer, local store, composition HOCs, and CLI tooling. Relay ensures data consistency, supports efficient queries and mutations, and simplifies pagination and fragment management. These features help developers avoid prop-drilling, manage data dependencies, and optimize performance. Learn more about Relay.

Does Hygraph provide an API?

Yes, Hygraph provides a powerful GraphQL API that allows you to fetch and manage content efficiently. You can learn more about it at the Hygraph API Reference.

Features & Capabilities

What features does Hygraph offer?

Hygraph offers a range of features including GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, robust security, and a user-friendly interface. It supports integrations with popular tools for hosting, eCommerce, localization, digital asset management, personalization, and AI. For a full list, visit the Hygraph Features page.

What integrations are available with Hygraph?

Hygraph integrates with a wide range of platforms, including Netlify, Vercel, BigCommerce, commercetools, Shopify, Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, Smartling, Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot, Ninetailed, AltText.ai, Adminix, and Plasmic. For more details, see the Hygraph Integrations page.

How does Hygraph ensure high performance and optimized content delivery?

Hygraph emphasizes optimized content delivery performance, which directly impacts user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. By ensuring rapid content distribution and responsiveness, Hygraph helps reduce bounce rates and increase conversions. Learn more about Hygraph's performance.

What security and compliance certifications does Hygraph have?

Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. It also offers features like SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments to protect sensitive data and meet regulatory standards. For more details, visit the Hygraph Security Features page.

How does Hygraph ensure high availability for enterprise customers?

Hygraph provides an uptime SLA of up to 99.9%, with options for dedicated hosting, choice of location, and disaster recovery. For current operational status, visit the Hygraph Status Page.

Pricing & Plans

What is Hygraph's pricing model?

Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans. For more details, visit the Hygraph Pricing page.

Use Cases & Benefits

Who can benefit from using Hygraph?

Hygraph is ideal for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project/program managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. It is especially beneficial for modern software companies, enterprises looking to modernize their technologies, and brands aiming to scale across geographies, improve development velocity, or re-platform from traditional solutions. See case studies.

What problems does Hygraph solve?

Hygraph addresses operational pains (such as reliance on developers for content updates, outdated tech stacks, and clunky user experiences), financial pains (high operational costs, slow speed-to-market, expensive maintenance, and scalability challenges), and technical pains (boilerplate code, overwhelming queries, evolving schemas, cache problems, and OpenID integration challenges). Learn more about Hygraph's solutions.

What business impact can customers expect from using Hygraph?

Customers can expect significant business impacts, including time-saving through streamlined workflows, ease of use with an intuitive interface, faster speed-to-market for digital products, and enhanced customer experience through consistent and scalable content delivery. These benefits help businesses modernize their tech stack and achieve operational efficiency. Read more.

What are some real-world success stories of customers using Hygraph?

Hygraph customers have achieved impressive results, such as Komax achieving a 3X faster time to market, Autoweb seeing a 20% increase in website monetization, Samsung improving customer engagement with a scalable platform, and Dr. Oetker enhancing their digital experience using MACH architecture. Explore more customer stories.

Which industries are represented in Hygraph's case studies?

Hygraph's case studies span industries such as food and beverage (Dr. Oetker), consumer electronics (Samsung), automotive (AutoWeb), healthcare (Vision Healthcare), travel and hospitality (HolidayCheck), media and publishing, eCommerce, SaaS (Bellhop), marketplace, education technology, and wellness and fitness. See all case studies.

Who are some of Hygraph's customers?

Notable Hygraph customers include Sennheiser, HolidayCheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. For more details, visit the Hygraph Case Studies page.

Technical Requirements & Documentation

Where can I find Hygraph's technical documentation?

Hygraph offers comprehensive technical documentation covering everything you need to know about building and deploying projects. Access it at the Hygraph Documentation page.

How easy is it to get started with Hygraph?

Hygraph is designed for ease of use, even for non-technical users. You can sign up for a free-forever account and use resources like documentation, video tutorials, and onboarding guides. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months from the initial touchpoint. Get started with Hygraph.

What training and technical support does Hygraph provide?

Hygraph offers 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone, onboarding sessions for enterprise customers, training resources such as video tutorials, documentation, and webinars, and access to Customer Success Managers for expert guidance. Contact Hygraph Support.

How does Hygraph handle maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting?

Hygraph provides 24/7 support for maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting through chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance, and all users can access detailed documentation and the community Slack channel for additional support. Learn more.

Performance & Metrics

What KPIs and metrics are associated with the pain points Hygraph solves?

Key metrics include time saved on content updates, number of updates made without developer intervention, system uptime, speed of deployment, consistency in content across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, ROI on CMS investment, time to market for new products, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage. Read more about CMS KPIs.

Customer Experience & Ease of Use

What feedback have customers given about Hygraph's ease of use?

Customers have praised Hygraph for its ease of use and intuitive interface, noting that it is 'super easy to set up and use' and that 'even non-technical users can start using it right away.' The user interface is described as logical and user-friendly, making it accessible for both technical and non-technical teams. Read more customer feedback.

Blog & Resources

Where can I find the Hygraph blog and what kind of content does it offer?

The Hygraph Blog provides the latest updates, developer tutorials, and essential guides to content modeling. Visit the Hygraph Blog for news and insights.

Who authored the blog post 'Relay Up and Running'?

The blog post 'Relay Up and Running' was written by Jesse Martin and published on September 24, 2020.

Webinar Event: How to Avoid Personalization Tech Traps

Relay Up and Running

Not surprisingly, Hygraph works perfectly with the framework built for GraphQL.
Jesse Martin

Written by Jesse 

Sep 24, 2020
Relay Up and Running with Hygraph

Whether you are new to GraphQL or already an old hat in the game, you've undoubtedly come across Relay. Relay was designed and developed in response to the real-world needs that arose after Facebook released GraphQL for companywide adoption. Simply put, Relay solves the problems you've undoubtedly faced yourself.

To be fair, Relay does need a little bit of setup, and the server needs to support some assumptions that Relay will make of it. Regarding the assumptions, well, Hygraph supports Relay out of the box! Nothing special is needed, you can use Relay today.

Regarding the boilerplate, well, that's what this post is intended to help solve. By far, the simplest way to get started with Relay would be using an existing web framework. We are somewhat bullish on NextjS here at Hygraph, and they have a Relay framework that we've based our example on. You can skip to the cloning step directly right here.

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#What is Relay

Relay is ultimately composed of a few "primitives" or building blocks that assist with the adoption of GraphQL in your project.

Environment

First, Relay includes an Environment constructor that handles the injection of the network layer and store throughout your app.

Network Layer

The network layer can be thought of as Fetch on steroids. It allows you to define the method in which you'll query your GraphQL endpoint throughout the application. If you need to define auth tokens or any other type of network settings, this is the place to do it. By default, a sensible local cache is also enabled.

Relay Store

The store is a type of local data "state manager." This allows you to arbitrarily fetch content throughout your application "after" it has been queried for by Relay, and will watch for updates. This lets you break out of the hierarchical data-dependency chain that composition can sometimes force on your app. Typically the parent needs to know about which data the child needs so that it can wire those dependencies down the composed stack. With the store, you can sort of pick bits of data from the store by key reference and drop them somewhere else in your application and they'll only be updated when the data is there.

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Composition HOCs

This feature is where some of the more practical benefits of Relay come into their own. Relay comes with a series of Higher-Order Components that let you handle behavior such as pagination, watching/re-fetching, and Fragment management.

We've linked the documentation to each of the respective components, but let's look at the Fragment Container (their term for the HOC). What makes this so special is that the individual component is allowed to declare the data it will be needing, and Relay guarantees the component won't load until the data requested is present! That's a major safety feature! For those who've worked with Gatsby, this is quite similar to how exporting fragments from components works, except that with Relay, you can pass arguments to the components which let you work with variables. That is a substantial developer experience boost.

CLI Tooling

To achieve these benefits listed above, Relay needs to know a few things about your project. First, it needs to know about your Schema, then it needs to know about all the queries you are using and all the fragments that individual components have declared. It then needs to optimize all of those so that at runtime, it can make clean and succinct queries (or mutations) to your server.

To do all of that, Relay has some built-in tooling for downloading your schema and for pre-compiling your queries. To assist the tooling Relay does expect a consistent naming convention that it will warn you about if you don't adhere. This generally follows the pattern of "Filename" followed by the expected property you assign to the response. In the case of the linked example, we'd see a Fragment named something like fragment Pizza_pizza, which corresponds to the name of the file Pizza and the property I assign the response to, pizza.

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#Summary

Obviously, there's much more that one could learn about Relay, and I encourage you to do so. Whether you are wanting to embrace full type-safety through your code and data dependencies, or are simply trying to avoid prop-drilling data through layers of nested composition (particularly dangerous in a team setting) - Relay will help you solve all of those architecture pieces and more.

Pagination is one area in particular where users get into a lot of trouble when they first adopt GraphQL. Relay will take a series of filters that define what a page is and then return helpers to indicate a loading status, whether or not there are more elements to fetch and the ability to define directionality in the fetching.

Hygraph, for its part, implements the required node interface, pagination filters, and generated connection types for you already so you can simply plug any Hygraph API in to a Relay project, run the tooling to introspect the schema, and be ready to work.

Checkout the repo and let us know what you think! Demo is live here.

Blog Author

Jesse Martin

Jesse Martin

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