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

“by 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:

“by

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

“