# Referencing parent fields with $this - The Weekly Wisdom - Edition #9

**URL:** https://community.apollographql.com/t/referencing-parent-fields-with-this-the-weekly-wisdom-edition-9/9189
**Category:** Weekly Wisdom
**Tags:** connectors, weekly-wisdom
**Created:** [June 12, 2025, 5:11am UTC](https://community.apollographql.com/t/referencing-parent-fields-with-this-the-weekly-wisdom-edition-9/9189 "2025-06-12T05:11:01Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![Michelle\_Mabuyo](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/community.apollographql.com/michelle_mabuyo/32/80_2.png) [@Michelle\_Mabuyo](https://community.apollographql.com/u/Michelle_Mabuyo)
#### Post date: [June 12, 2025, 5:11am UTC](https://community.apollographql.com/t/referencing-parent-fields-with-this-the-weekly-wisdom-edition-9/9189/1 "2025-06-12T05:11:02Z")

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### 🎓 Welcome to The Weekly Wisdom

**🗓 Edition #9 - 3 Jul 2025**  
**🏷 Topic tags - #Connectors #odyssey**  
**🔔 Stay in the loop: Subscribe to the “The Weekly Wisdom” category to get notified when new posts drop—no FOMO here.**

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Hey all! 👋 Michelle here from the Apollo Education team. I’m a Developer Educator and I build courses for Odyssey, our official learning platform.

I’m back for the next edition of a multi-part series to teach you the basics of Apollo Connectors: a powerful way to bring existing REST APIs into your graph, all through configuration in the schema.

### 💡This week’s learning: Referencing parent fields with `$this`

When orchestrating multiple REST calls, it’s common to need values from the parent object to build your request. Apollo Connectors lets you do this elegantly using the `$this` variable..

Let’s say we’re building a schema for bookings, and each booking has a guest review that lives in a separate REST endpoint. We can use `$this.id` to grab the booking’s ID and pass it as a parameter in the Connector’s request:

```graphql
type Booking {
  id: ID!
  guestReview: Review
    @connect(
      source: "listings"
      http: { GET: "/guestReview?bookingId={$this.id}" }
      selection: """
      id
      text
      rating
      """
    )
}

```

With just this bit of schema, we’ve orchestrated two REST calls: one to retrieve the booking, one for the related guest review, with no resolver code required!

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### 🔎 Want to go deeper?

You’ll find a full walkthrough in[Lesson 8 of the Odyssey tutorial](https://www.apollographql.com/tutorials/connectors-intro-rest/08-orchestration), where we put $this to work in real examples.

[Take the course](https://www.apollographql.com/tutorials/connectors-intro-rest)

* * *

### 💬 Share your thoughts in the thread below ⬇

Can you think of a REST endpoint in your app where `$this` would make orchestrating a related call easier?

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### Author: ![Chauntay\_Lawson](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/community.apollographql.com/chauntay_lawson/32/5424_2.png) [@Chauntay\_Lawson](https://community.apollographql.com/u/Chauntay_Lawson)
#### Post date: [July 3, 2025, 5:21pm UTC](https://community.apollographql.com/t/referencing-parent-fields-with-this-the-weekly-wisdom-edition-9/9189/2 "2025-07-03T17:21:04Z")

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![Chauntay\_Lawson](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/community.apollographql.com/chauntay_lawson/32/5424_2.png) [@Chauntay\_Lawson](https://community.apollographql.com/u/Chauntay_Lawson)
#### Post date: [July 3, 2025, 5:21pm UTC](https://community.apollographql.com/t/referencing-parent-fields-with-this-the-weekly-wisdom-edition-9/9189/3 "2025-07-03T17:21:34Z")

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