Neo4j auto increase schema index

Question

It is recommended not to use Neo4j's id property because it may change, but rather create our own identifier. Then to identify my users, I plan to create a user_id property on the nodes labelled User and put an index on it. However, I cannot figure out a way to make it auto increase.

After some searching, I noticed there are two kinds of indexes in Neo4j, the schema index and the legacy index. Could anyone explain to me the difference between them? And is there a way to make my user_id index auto increase?

Answer 1

Schema indices are effectively labels, e.g. :User. You can also create indices on the properties of those labels if you wish. There's also no need to specify which index you're using as this is done automatically, in this case.

Legacy indices are the node indices that were around prior to Neo4j 2.0. They're a traditional index where you can specify what you're indexing and which properties they apply to, but, they're only used in START statements, which are optional (and on their way to deprecation).

For more detail, have a look here (http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/stable/graphdb-neo4j-schema.html) and here (http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/stable/indexing.html).

As for auto-incrementing, I'm unaware of any such functionality for user-defined index keys.

HTH