Spring Data Neo4j was the first Spring Data project, started by the CEOs Rod Johnson and Emil Eifrem. It enables convenient integration of Neo4j in your Spring-based application. It provides object-graph mapping functionality and other features common to the Spring Data projects.
To use Neo4j with Spring Data Neo4j, you just add the dependency for Spring-Boot and Spring-Data-Neo4j to your build setup.
link:pom.xml[role=include]
After setting up a Java-based Spring-Boot configuration,
link:src/main/java/movies/spring/data/neo4j/MyNeo4jConfiguration.java[role=include]
and annotating your @Node-
and @RelationshipEntity
, you can use the Neo4jTemplate
to access Neo4j APIs and object graph mapping functionality.
link:src/main/java/movies/spring/data/neo4j/domain/Movie.java[role=include]
Additionally you can leverage the convenient Spring-Data repositories to get interface-based DAO implementations injected into your Spring Components.
link:src/main/java/movies/spring/data/neo4j/repositories/MovieRepository.java[role=include]
In our case we use the repository from a MovieService
to compute the graph representation for the visualization.
The service is then injected into our main Boot application, which also doubles as @RestMvcController
which exposes the /graph
endpoint.
The other two endpoints for finding multiple movies by title and loading a single movie are provided out of the box by the Spring-Data-Rest project which exposes our MovieRepository
as REST endpoints.
The rendering of the movie objects (and related entities) happens automatically out of the box via Jackson mapping.
See the {github}/examples/java/spring-data-neo4j[GitHub repository] for the source code.
Note
|
The current version of Spring Data Neo4j works best with an embedded Neo4j database. To achieve highest-performance Neo4j-Server integration move your SDN persistence layer into a Server Extension. |
These are the components of our Web Application:
-
Application Type: Spring-Boot Java Web Application (Jetty)
-
Web framework: Spring-Boot enabled Spring-WebMVC, Spring-Data-Rest
-
Persistence Access: Spring-Data-Neo4j
-
Database: Neo4j-Server
-
Frontend: jquery, bootstrap, d3.js
Get Movie
// JSON object for single movie with cast curl http://localhost:8080/movies/search/findByTitle?0=The%20Matrix // list of JSON objects for movie search results curl http://localhost:8080/movies/search/findByTitleContaining?0=matrix // JSON object for whole graph viz (nodes, links - arrays) curl http://localhost:8080/graph