The IT Solutions Market Share Analysis for August 2026

While Strapi's own [documentation](https://docs.strapi.io/developer-docs/latest/plugins/graphql.html) is good for adding GraphQL support, it also confusing **what customizations are available** when somebody wants to use GraphQL. As our project is using Strapi v4, we had to learn how to create such queries, compared to v3. # The first example under the official GraphQL documentation's [Customization section](https://docs.strapi.io/developer-docs/latest/plugins/graphql.html#customization) is a showcase of the capabilities without providing much context. That example - next to some ShadowCRUD settings - creates two object types (Book and Article), a custom [Nexus](https://nexusjs.org/) plugin, overrides a query resolver for an existing content type (address) and disables authentication for the same content type (Query.address). # For me, it was hard to see **how to set up a new query,** **define new types** and **how to re-use already existing types** from other content-types. As our project is using Strapi v4, we had to learn how to create such queries, compared to v3. # Eventually, we could explore the documentation, the Strapi codebase and the examples of official plugins (like users and permissions plugin) and conclude a way to **effectively add GraphQL customizations**. # **This post is showing the results of our findings and aims to help the developers who need to achieve similar goals with Strapi v4.** ## The domain for the example Let's assume that we are developing an e-commerce site where we sell products. One day we would like to add a feature to track popularity of each product using a third party solution. To keep the API keys secret at the server side, we are planning to define a new GraphQL query to the existing GraphQL schema provided by Strapi. # This query will handle the integration to the 3rd party API and optionally return the product data if requested. ## Initialize the project For the sake of simplicity, we are setting up a new Strapi proje