Neo4j first node to meet relationship in a movie model

Question

I have read the Neo4j manual and saw the numerous short examples regarding movie graph. I have also installed it locally and played with the cypher.

Here is the setup: I have the following nodes: Movies (with name and id, owned by friend), Actors(with name and ids) Directors (with names and id), Genre (with id and name)

Relations are: Actors acted in Movies (1 movie - many actors), Directors directed a movie (1 director per movie but a director can direct many movies), and Movies has several genre "(many to many)

1) Owned by friend I dont know why but following the LOAD CSV example they put USA as a node rather than a property but is there a logical reason why its better to put it as a node rather than a property like i did?

2) What I want to search is similar to the answer given to this question: Nearest nodes to a give node, assigning dynamically weight to relationship types

However - I do not have a weight on the relationship and its more of a "go find the first give nodes connected to it"

Given that the "owned by friend" can only be owned by 1 person.

If given movie title "Spider-Man" (which for example purpose is owned by frank) go find the next occurrence of a movie that is owned by John.

So after reading Neo4j I believe that I dont need to specify which relationship is needed to traverse but just go find the next movie that meets my criteria, right?

So Following the above link

MATCH (n:Start { title: 'Spider-Man' }),
  (n)-[:CONNECTED*0..2]-(x)
RETURN x

So go to node Spider-Man and go find me X as long as it is connected but I got stump by *0..2 because its the range...what if I just say "go find me the first you that means the own by John"

3) following up to #2 - how do i insert the fitler "own by john" ?

Jim Biard Jim Biard · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-25T13:04:07

There are a number of things in your question that don't quite make sense. Here's a stab at an answer.

1) Making 'USA' a node rather than a property is useful if you want to search based on country. If 'USA' is a node, you are able to limit your search by starting at the 'USA' node. If you don't care to do this, then it doesn't really matter. It may also save a small amount of space for longer country names to store the name once and link to it via relationships.

2) Your example doesn't match your described graph. I can't really speak to it without a better example.

3) This is probably easy to answer once you improve your example.

OK. Based on the comments to the answer, here's what you need. To find one movie owned by John that is connected via common actors, directors, etc to the movie Spider-man owned by Frank (that is, sub-graphs like (movie)<--(actor)-->(movie) ) you can write:

MATCH (n:Movie {title : 'Spider-Man', owned_by : 'Frank'})<-[*2]->(m:Movie {owned_by : 'John'})
RETURN m LIMIT 1

If you want more responses, alter or remove the LIMIT on the RETURN clause. If you want to allow chains that pass through chains like (movie)<--(actor)-->(movie)<--(director)-->(movie), you can increase the number of relationships matched (the *2) to 4, 6, 8, etc. You probably shouldn't just write the relationship part of the MATCH clause as -[*]-, because this could get into infinite loops.

Neo4j first node to meet relationship in a movie model

1 Answers