Question

I am using node-neo4j to communicate with my neo4j. Following github.com/aseemk/node-neo4j-template was a real help to get started. Still learning my way to get things done, I am looking to solve a few issues, I’d appreciate any heads up you give me.

Implement site wide search.

We have users indexed with their email id’s, and want to index stories/posts by tags or keywords. How do we search across all nodes, do we maintain indices for all nodes of various types, what would be a good approach? Should I go with google to enable this feature? How to index same node with multiple tags/keywords?

Specify custom id’s for nodes

We are fine with integer indices for nodes, but since these id’s can be re-used, we would like to identify nodes with unique id’s, Is there a way to make neo4j use uuid’s, adding an uid attribute would do but want to avoid having to maintain two id’s.

Traversing nodes

How do we traverse nodes using node-neo4j, Cipher-lang looks like the answer, I am yet to get used to it. Does node-neo4j help do this out of the box?

Transactions

I may sound silly, but can I do transactional operations with node-neo4j?

Too many questions, I feel most of my doubts would clear once I get more used to querying the db, but any input from you will give me a headstart.

Answer 1

You probably should have broken this up into separate questions. I can answer a couple of them but not all.

Yes, node-neo4j can handle Cypher out of the box, with the query method: https://github.com/thingdom/node-neo4j/blob/develop/lib/GraphDatabase._coffee#L179. Help with Cypher–you should watch this intro video: http://vimeopro.com/neo4j/webinars/video/48603403

For your uuid, you probably should add a separate attribute to the nodes, and have an index on it–just ignore the regular ids except during transient queries where it’s more convenient. As far as I know there’s no way to override the incrementing ID–that sure would be nice, though.

Hope that helps.