Connection is based on `array`,is this a design st

Question

In connection/arrayconnection.js, It seems all the function is tend to work with array.
For example: offsetToCursor is the only way to generate Cursor. Does this mean its a design pattern i must follow, or imply that i should generate Cursor by myself when using something other than array.If im planning to use Mongodb,should i make the database interface like an static array ?

BTW:
As a newbie to web develop, im a bit confused how to implement a qualified relay server.
Are there some guide for design a graphql-relay server, should i follow all the way in graphql-relay-js, which Database Facebook used with relay-server ? mysql or ?
Im not sure ask this here is appropriate or not,but the topic for graphql-relay-js is rarely on the web.
Thanks a lot, forgive my impolite.

var PREFIX = 'arrayconnection:';
/**
 * Creates the cursor string from an offset.
*/
export function offsetToCursor(offset: number): ConnectionCursor {
    return base64(PREFIX + offset);
}

---

Additional question:
Maybe i get some idea from developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api.
Seems should do an array style cache for pagination lookup( not sure about this). But graph-api looks a bit different from graphql-relay-js (is graph-api still some part of old restful style?),
What is the relationship between graph-api and graphql-relay-js ? Is graphql-relay-js a common design guide for design a graphql server in facebook? Thanks a lot! please give me some hints

Answer 1

Connection is a design pattern that your schema may implement if you want Relay to perform efficient pagination. How it gets implemented on the backend is an implementation detail. It may be backed by something array-like, or it may not (think about something like the infinite scrolling news feed on Facebook, which is ranked by a terribly sophisticated backend service: this is clearly not backed by an array). We provide the arrayconnection.js module as a way of demonstrating how this can be done if your data source has that array-like nature. If it does not, or cannot be efficiently converted to it, you are better off implementing something from scratch.

Cursors are opaque identifiers. You could use an array index or some kind of primary key if you are using an array source or a typical database backend (like MySQL), but again the details are implementation-specific and should be chosen to suit your back end. The only requirement is that the cursor should encode whatever information you need on the server to be able to return the next page of results after (or before) that point.

graphql-relay-js is just a collection of modules that provide some helpers for building Relay-compatible GraphQL schemas in JavaScript. The schema provides a uniform interface to your data, but the actual underlying storage can be anything you want to plug into it (a MySQL database, an object in memory, some REST service). For simple examples, look in the examples directory in the Relay repo. As an illustration of how you can put a schema in front of something that is not a traditional database, this is an example of a schema that reads its data out of a Git repo, with the help of indices in Redis and cached data in memcached.

Stay away from developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api; despite the "graph" in the name this is an entirely different thing and has nothing to do with the GraphQL hierarchical query language that Relay uses.