Introduction

neo4apis is a ruby gem for building objects which import data into neo4j. It takes care of batching of queries for better import performance and creating indexes for better query performance. It also uses MERGEs to make sure the same node/relationship isn't imported twice. neo4apis is for anybody who want to build a gem or even just an adapter in their application which encapsulates the logic of data import from some source. For examples see the drivers for Twitter and GitHub

In the below example we assume that a variable awesome_client is passed in which allows us to make requests to the API. This may be, for example, provided by another gem.

To install

gem 'neo4apis' in your Gemfile or gem install neo4apis

To use

  require 'neo4apis'

  module Neo4Apis
    class AwesomeSite < Base
      # Adds a prefix to labels so that they become AwesomeSiteUser and AwesomeSiteWidget (optional)
      prefix :AwesomeSite

      # Number of queries which are built up until batch request to DB is made (optional, default = 500)
      batch_size 2000

      uuid :User, :id
      uuid :Widget, :uuid

      def import_widget_search(*args)
        @client.widget_search(*args).each do |widget|
          add_widget(widget)
        end
      end

      importer :Widget do |widget|
        user_node = add_user(widget.owner)

        # add_node comes from From Neo4Apis::Base
        # Imports the uuid and text values from the widget object to the node 
        node = add_node(:Widget, widget, [:uuid, :text]) do |node|
          # Imports the double_foo property to the node which isn't a simple copy
          node.double_foo = widget.foo * 2
        end

        # add_relationship comes from Neo4Apis::Base
        add_relationship(:owns, user_node, node)

        node
      end

      importer :User do |user|
        add_node :User, user, [:id, :username, :name]
      end

    end
  end

Then somebody else could use your gem in the following manner:

neo4j_session = Neo4j::Session.open # From the neo4j-core gem
awesome_client = Awesome.open # From a theoretical API wrapping gem

neo4apis_awesome = Neo4Apis::AwesomeSite.new(neo4j_session)

neo4apis_awesome.batch do
  awesome_client.widget_search('cool').each do |widget|
    neo4apis_awesome.import :Widget, widget # import is provided by neo4apis
  end
end

Options

Options can be used in the instantiation of the Neo4Apis client:

neo4apis_awesome = Neo4Apis::AwesomeSite.new(neo4j_session, {option: value})

relationship_transform

Allowed values upcase, downcase, and none. Default: upcase

How should relationship types be transformed when saving? Neo4j recommends upper case relationship types, so upcase is the default. none sends through relationship types as specified in the add_relationship method