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Querying with a custom configuration in a JavaScript app

Querying with a custom configuration in a JavaScript app

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In the previous guide, we looked into querying with a custom config from the command line. In this guide, we'll do the same from within a JavaScript application, but we will split up our config across different files for convenience.

This guide assumes basic knowledge on querying with Comunica. If you haven't looked into this yet, it is recommended to follow the getting started guide on querying within a JavaScript app.

1. Installation

This assumes you already have an npm package. If you don't have one yet, create one using npm init. You will also need a JavaScript file to write in, such as main.js.

In order to add Comunica SPARQL as a dependency to your Node.js application, we can execute the following command:

$ npm install @comunica/query-sparql

2. Creating a new query engine

While QueryEngine is used to import Comunica SPARQL's default config, we can load a custom config by creating our engine via newEngineDynamic():

const QueryEngineFactory = require('@comunica/query-sparql').QueryEngineFactory;

const myEngine = await new QueryEngineFactory().create({
    configPath: 'config.json', // Relative or absolute path 
});

configPath refers to a config file, which we will create in the next step.

3. Start from an existing config file

The easiest way to create a custom config, is to start from an existing one, and add/remove things to fit your needs.

Let's create a file called config.json in your package.

In this guide, we will start from the Comunica SPARQL default config file. Let's copy its contents entirely into our config.json:

{
  "@context": [
    "https://linkedsoftwaredependencies.org/bundles/npm/@comunica/config-query-sparql/^2.0.0/components/context.jsonld"
  ],
  "import": [
    "ccqs:config/context-preprocess/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/context-preprocess/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/hash-bindings/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/hash-bindings/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/http/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/http/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/http-invalidate/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/http-invalidate/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/init/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/optimize-query-operation/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/optimize-query-operation/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/query-operation/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/query-operation/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/query-parse/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/query-parse/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/query-result-serialize/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/query-result-serialize/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/dereference/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/dereference/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/dereference-rdf/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/dereference-rdf/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-join/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-join/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-join-entries-sort/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-join-entries-sort/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-join-selectivity/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-join-selectivity/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-metadata/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-metadata/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-metadata-extract/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-metadata-extract/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-parse/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-parse/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-parse-html/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-resolve-hypermedia/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-resolve-hypermedia/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-resolve-hypermedia-links/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-resolve-hypermedia-links/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-resolve-hypermedia-links-queue/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-resolve-hypermedia-links-queue/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-resolve-quad-pattern/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-resolve-quad-pattern/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-serialize/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-serialize/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-update-hypermedia/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-update-hypermedia/mediators.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-update-quads/actors.json",
    "ccqs:config/rdf-update-quads/mediators.json"
  ]
}

4. Executing SPARQL SELECT queries

Once your engine has been created based on your custom config, you can use it to execute any SPARQL query, such as a SELECT query:

const bindingsStream = await myEngine.queryBindings(`
  SELECT ?s ?p ?o WHERE {
    ?s ?p <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Belgium>.
    ?s ?p ?o
  } LIMIT 100`, {
  sources: ['http://fragments.dbpedia.org/2015/en'],
});

bindingsStream.on('data', (binding) => {
    console.log(binding.get('s').value);
    console.log(binding.get('p').value);
    console.log(binding.get('o').value);
});

If you wrote this in a file called main.js, you can invoke it by executing node main.js.

If you run into config loading problems, make sure your app has a package.json file, otherwise config loading will fail.

5. Only allowing `SELECT` queries

Our goal in this step is to build a query engine that can only execute SELECT queries, and we don't want to be able to execute CONSTRUCT and DESCRIBE queries. This will require us to remove some more actors.

While the actors for CONSTRUCT and DESCRIBE are defined in ccqs:config/query-operation/actors.json, we can not just simply remove that file from our imports, because it also contains actors for other SPARQL query operators which we don't want to remove, such as SELECT.

In the guide on querying with a custom config from the command line, we achieved this by inlining ccqs:config/query-operation/actors.json into our main config file. In this guide, we'll do this in a cleaner way by redefining the contents of ccqs:config/query-operation/actors.json in a separate local file, and applying our changes there.

5.1. Declare config options in `package.json`

Before we can refer to other files within our config file, we have to add some entries to our package.json file so that the config files can be found during engine initialization.

Concretely, we need to add the following entry to package.json:

{
  ...
  "lsd:module": true
  ...
}

If you want to learn more about what this entry means, read our guide on Components.js, a dependency injection framework that Comunica uses.

5.2. Create a context

In order to allow our config file to import other files, we need to create a JSON-LD context file.

Create the file components/context.jsonld with the following contents:

{
  "@context": [
    "https://linkedsoftwaredependencies.org/bundles/npm/componentsjs/^5.0.0/components/context.jsonld",
    {
      "npmd": "https://linkedsoftwaredependencies.org/bundles/npm/",
      "my": "npmd:my-package/^1.0.0/"
    }
  ]
}

Again, make sure to replace my-package with your package name.

To avoid collisions with other packages, it is recommended to use another prefix than "my" in your context.

5.3. Copying `config/query-operation/actors.json`

Next, we will create a local copy of ccqs:config/query-operation/actors.json.

For this, create a file config/query-operation/actors.json, and paste in the contents of ccqs:config/query-operation/actors.json (GitHub).

5.4. Make config refer to local `config/query-operation/actors.json`

Now that we have declared config options in our package.json, created a context, and created a local copy of config/query-operation/actors.json, everything is ready to modify our config.json to refer to our local config/query-operation/actors.json.

For this, remove the following line from config.json:

-  "ccqs:config/query-operation/actors.json",

And replace it with the following line:

+  "my:config/query-operation/actors.json",

Also add the newly created config to the contexts of the config file (again replacing my-package with your package name):

    "@context": [
+     "https://linkedsoftwaredependencies.org/bundles/npm/my-package/^1.0.0/components/context.jsonld",
      "https://linkedsoftwaredependencies.org/bundles/npm/@comunica/config-query-sparql/^2.0.0/components/context.jsonld"
    ],

This change means that Comunica will load its query operators from our local config/query-operation/actors.json file, instead of the default ccqs:config/query-operation/actors.json file.

If you run your app again, things should still function like before at this point.

5.5. Remove actors

Next, we will remove the actors we don't need. Concretely, we will remove the following imports to actors:

ccqs:config/query-operation/actors/query/construct.json: Handles CONSTRUCT queries.
ccqs:config/query-operation/actors/query/describe.json: Handles DESCRIBE queries.

For this, remove the following lines:

-    "ccqs:config/query-operation/actors/query/construct.json",
-    "ccqs:config/query-operation/actors/query/describe.json",

5.6. Test changes

After this change, you should now be unable to execute CONSTRUCT or DESCRIBE queries. Try this out by executing the following:

const quadStream = await myEngine.queryQuads(`
  CONSTRUCT WHERE {
    ?s ?p ?o
  } LIMIT 100`, {
  sources: ['http://fragments.dbpedia.org/2015/en'],
});

quadStream.on('data', (quad) => {
    console.log(quad.subject.value);
    console.log(quad.predicate.value);
    console.log(quad.object.value);
    console.log(quad.graph.value);
});

Executing a SELECT query will still work:

const bindingsStream = await myEngine.queryBindings(`
  SELECT ?s ?p ?o WHERE {
    ?s ?p <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Belgium>.
    ?s ?p ?o
  } LIMIT 100`, {
  sources: ['http://fragments.dbpedia.org/2015/en'],
});

bindingsStream.on('data', (binding) => {
    console.log(binding.get('s').value);
    console.log(binding.get('p').value);
    console.log(binding.get('o').value);
});

You have now successfully built your own custom Comunica engine that is a bit more lightweight than the default one. Just like the CONSTRUCT and DESCRIBE actors, you can remove any other actors you don't want to make it even more lightweight.

If you want, you can create additional config file parts in config/ and refer to them from our main config.json with the my: prefix.

If you want to add an actor that is not present in the default Comunica SPARQL config, have a look at this example on replacing the HTTP actor with a Solid HTTP actor.