Neo4j Match on Lists

Question

So in Neo4j if you have various nodes and they have a property with 1 value as follows:

n.stringProp = "something"

Then you can get various nodes that comply with any property within a query list using a MATCH query like

MATCH (n) 
WHERE n.stringProp IN ["something", "somethingElse", "etc"]
RETURN n

However if you have nodes with properties that are lists, as follows:

n.stringListProp = ["red", "purple", "green"]

And you want to get nodes that have any 1 or more of the tags in a query list in their list properties then you cannot simply do a query like:

MATCH (n)
WHERE n.stringListProp IN ["red"]
RETURN n

And you also cannot use CONTAINS because that is for substrings. So you cannot do:

MATCH (n)
WHERE n.stringListProp CONTAINS "red"
RETURN n

And you can't loop through them using a FOREACH because FOREACH is only for CREATE, MERGE or DELETE operations. So I think you have to use UNWIND for this type of MATCH query but I'm really not sure how to structure this query.

If anyone knows how to do this can you please help me out?

hint: try using one of the list predicate functions - neo4j.com/docs/cypher-manual/4.0/functions/predicate — aldrin
@aldrin thank you, I actually completely overlooked these functions. Using the ANY predicate function will do exactly what I need. — itstudes

itstudes itstudes · Accepted Answer · 2020-04-09T14:22:53

As per the comments on my Question, the ANY predicate function solves this problem.

See MATCH query below:

MATCH (n)
WHERE ANY (color IN n.stringListProp WHERE color IN ["red", "pink", "cyan"])
RETURN n

This query will check if any of the nodes with a stringListProp property has any of the items in the query list.

Neo4j Match on Lists

1 Answers