Allow specifying rules for both types and fields

Feature request

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

As far as I’m aware, right now you can specify shield rules for either a type or a selection of subfields on that type, but not both. So if I wanted to restrict access to users that have been archieved, I can do that no problem, if I want to restrict access so only the current user can see their respective address, no problem either, but I’m not aware of a way to combine the two.

Describe the solution you’d like

Implementing this might be really hard to implement without breaking anything. Ideally you’d have the option to introduce an special field into your type permissions that handles the type permissions, as that would hopefully be the least invasive.

So somethina long the lines of:

shield({
User: {
_canViewModel: rules.notArchieved,
address: rules.isCurrentUser
})

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

Other solutions would include changing the internal shieldRules schema to diffrentiate between subfields and the parent type, or having a diffrent naming convention for the two, along the lines of User: {...}, Usertype: rule, but both of those wouldd probably break to much existing code.

Additional context

[maticzav]

Hey @luhagel 👋 ,

Thank you for opening the issue. I had a similar idea a long time ago that would allow us to use and, or, and other logical patterns on dictionaries as well as rules. In the case of dictionaries, we would simply merge the rules at the lower level.

For example,

const permissions = shield({
  Query: and(isAuthenticated, {
    fruits: or(isAdmin, isEditor),
    customers: isAdmin,
  },
})

would translate to

const permissions = shield({
  Query: {
    fruits: and(isAuthenticated, or(isAdmin, isEditor)),
    customers: and(isAuthenticated, isAdmin),
  }
})

Is that what you had in mind?

It’s one of the last things that I think are truly missing from the library alongside race rule (https://github.com/maticzav/graphql-shield/issues/645).

I am sad to say this, but since this library lost its funding, I am not sure when I’ll find time to implement these features.

[maticzav]

Not exactly. I mean it depends on your schema, not your permissions.

If one of your fields (let’s say email) were required in User and the email-resolver returned null, you’d get

{ "user": null }

If email were an optional field, however, you’d get

{ "user": { "name": null, "email": null } }