Neo4j Object Mapping With GORM, Groovy, and Spring Boot

Mapping object models to the Neo4j 

graph in languages such as Java and Groovy may be immensely convenient when developing your application, but has the danger of obfuscating the power of Neo4j.

With the recently released GORM for Neo4j 6.1 at OCI, the home of the core Grails team, we built a tool that takes advantage of the native features exposed by the Neo4j Bolt Java Driver.

Get Started

If you want to get started immediately, we’ve provided 

that walks through all the features that GORM provides for Neo4j.

You’ll use GORM and Grails to develop a simple web application for the built-in movie database. The guide covers the backend with domain model and services, which provide REST endpoints to a JavaScript UI.

A repository with the resulting Grails application 

.

If you’d rather use Spring Boot with Web-MVC, GORM provides you the same benefits. Here is a repository for an example Spring Boot application that achieves the same thing.

But now, let’s look at GORM for Neo4j in some more detail.

Model Nodes, Relationships, and Paths

GORM for Neo4j allows you to model 

, but also to 

.

Combine all of this with the supporting features that you would expect from an object mapping tool, such as:

• Dirty checking and optimized updates.
• Batch writes with UNWIND
• Transaction management.
• Customizable ID generation.
• Optimistic locking.
• Lazy loading.

import grails.gorm.annotation.*
@Entity
class Movie {
    String title
    String tagline
    int released
}

Relationships can be modeled by using the

trait:

import grails.neo4j.Relationship

@Entity
class CastMember implements Relationship

      { 
    List

       roles = [] } 

These can then be queried either natively or using GORM’s 

.

Later you can use more advanced GORM features like constraints or has-many mappings.

class Movie {
    String title
    String tagline
    int released

    static hasMany = [cast: CastMember]

    static constraints = {
        released min:1900
        title blank:false
    }
}

Groovy and Neo4j: A Natural Fit

With Neo4j being a schema-less database, Groovy’s ability to simplify dynamic code (whilst still providing support for static compilation) really shines.

You can of course statically declare the properties of your domain class, but if you need to assign dynamic properties to individual objects, that is not a problem with Groovy.

For example, you can read and write dynamic properties using Groovy’s subscript operator, thus not limiting yourself to a statically defined schema:

Movie movie = Movie.findByTitle("The Matrix")
movie["rating"] = 5

println "The movie ${movie} is rated ${movie['rating']}"

Harness the Power of Cypher

GORM for Neo4j provides many 

, though none of these impacts your ability to use the native power of 

.

You can use Cypher for all your queries, or just to solve specific problems, such as finding the shortest path.

You can even get GORM to write your Cypher query logic for you, using 

!

For example the following interface uses the @Cypher annotation to automatically implement a method called updatePerson for you.

import grails.gorm.services.Service
import grails.neo4j.services.Cypher

@Service(Person)
interface PersonService {

    @Cypher("""MATCH ${Person p} 
               WHERE ${p.name} = ${name}  
               SET ${p.age} = ${age}""")
    void updatePerson(String name, int age)
}

Compile time checking is applied against the classes and property references including within the Cypher query!

Built for the Real World

Our preference at 

is to always build solutions based on real-world experiences, and with GORM for Neo4j that hasn’t changed.

We worked together with Brinqa – a leading provider of unified risk management – to build an object mapping solution for Neo4j that addresses their real-world challenges.

Curious to know more? We have prepared 

based on the original Neo4j movies data model that demonstrates building an application with Grails, GORM 6.1 and Neo4j. Please check it out and 

.

[As community content, this post reflects the views and opinions of the particular author and does not necessarily reflect the official stance of Neo4j.]