Neo4j.Driver.Extensions

This is a collection of extension methods for the Neo4j.Driver.

The aim is to make it a bit simpler to use, it doesn't cover all use cases at the moment, and is a work in progress that I'll update as and when new cases arrive.

This is NetStandard2.1 to allow the use of IAsyncEnumerable and as such - can't be used in any lower version.

Current Build:

Available on Nuget

Usage

For the below examples, the Movie class looks like:

public class Movie
{
    [Neo4jProperty(Name = "title")]
    public string Title { get; set; }

    [Neo4jProperty(Name = "released")]
    public long? Released { get; set; }

    [Neo4jProperty(Name = "tagline")]
    public string Tagline { get; set; }

    public static string Labels => nameof(Movie);
}

No-Extension Approach

If you use the Neo4j.Driver to access your data, you have to write code like this:

var session = _driver.AsyncSession();
var results = await session.ReadTransactionAsync(async x =>
{
    var cursor = await x.RunAsync($"MATCH (m:{Movie.Labels}) WHERE m.title = $title RETURN m", new { title });
    var fetched = await cursor.FetchAsync();

    while (fetched)
    {
        var node = cursor.Current["m"].As<INode>();
        var movie = new Movie
        {
            Title = node.Properties.ContainsKey("title") ? node.Properties["title"].As<string>() : null,
            Tagline = node.Properties.ContainsKey("tagline") ? node.Properties["tagline"].As<string>() : null,
            Released = node.Properties.ContainsKey("released") ? node.Properties["released"].As<int?>() : null
        };
        return movie;
    }

    return null;
});

return results;

There is a lot of boiler plate code around there, and some you'll want to keep, but the aim of this project is to make that a bit simpler to use. The examples below will take the above code and show how you can use the extensions to make it easier to read.

Node - GetValue method

The first thing we can do is make the getting of values better, so, let's take the Properties getters:

Title = node.Properties.ContainsKey("title") ? node.Properties["title"].As<string>() : null,

and replace with:

Title = node.GetValue<string>("title"),

or

Title = node.GetValueStrict<string>("title"),

GetValue<T> will return the value from the INode, or a default, so for string the default is null for int the default is 0. GetValueStrict<T> will return the value, or throw a KeyNotFoundException exception if the value isn't there. So choose whichever makes most sense in your code.

Issues - This hasn't been tested with IEnumerable properties, at the moment, just primitives.

Node - ToObject method

We can take the entire Movie creation code:

var movie = new Movie
{
    Title = node.Properties.ContainsKey("title") ? node.Properties["title"].As<string>() : null,
    Tagline = node.Properties.ContainsKey("tagline") ? node.Properties["tagline"].As<string>() : null,
    Released = node.Properties.ContainsKey("released") ? node.Properties["released"].As<int?>() : null
};

and change it to:

var movie = node.ToObject<Movie>();

Issues - As with GetValue<T> this only copes with primitive properties at the moment!

Neo4jPropertyAttribute

This allows you to decorate your class' properties with attributes to let the ToObject<T> method know how you want to read your data.

To use a different name in the database to your classes, use the Name property:

[Neo4jProperty(Name = "title")]
public string Title { get; set; }

To ignore a property, so no attempt is made to read it, use the Ignore property:

[Neo4jProperty(Ignore = true)]
public string Title { get; set; }