Hilly Fields Technical College

Overview

This demo web application shows developers how to quickly get started with the Neo4j OGM library and Neo4j graph database. For the Spring Framework version of this application please check out SDN University.

Hilly Fields Technical College is a fictitious educational institution. This application allows you to manage its departments, teaching staff, subjects, students and classes.

This project is built using:

Neo4j OGM 3.0
AngularJS 1.3
Bootstrap 3.3
Ratpack 1.4

It leverages the power of the Neo4j Object Graph Mapper(OGM) to via a RESTful interface with which a web client application may interact. The application is entirely stateless: every interaction involves a call over the wire to a Neo4j server.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

You will need to following to run this application:

Java 8
Neo4j version 3.1 or above. Optional if you are using the embedded driver.

Gradle has already been downloaded for you to execute.

Download the application

Either download the application or use git to clone the application:

git clone git@github.com:neo4j-examples/neo4j-ogm-university.git
cd neo4j-ogm-university

The static resources defined in the bower.json file will be installed under the src/ratpack/public/bower_components directory. This directory is ignored by git.

Configuration

This sample uses the bolt driver to connect to a local Neo4j instance running on port 7474. If you want to change this behaviour and/or provide your credentials read the sub-sections below.

Properties

If you are using a bolt or http connection to the database you'll need to provide connection credentials. To do this is to set the Neo4j username and password in src/main/resources/ogm.properties

# use bolt driver
URI=bolt://localhost
# use http driver
# URI=http://localhost:7474
username=<Your username here>
password=<Your password here>

To make the application use the embedded driver comment the URI property.

Dependencies

To use other drivers than bolt you also have to define the dependencies in the build.gradle file.

// use bolt driver
runtime 'org.neo4j:neo4j-ogm-bolt-driver:3.0.0'

// use http driver
// runtime 'org.neo4j:neo4j-ogm-http-driver:3.0.0'

// use embedded driver
// runtime 'org.neo4j:neo4j-ogm-embedded-driver:3.0.0'
// runtime 'org.neo4j:neo4j:3.2.5'

Starting the application

You can then start the application with gradle:

./gradlew run

And that's it! Head to http://localhost:5050 to see your application running.

Loading the initial dataset

WARNING!

By default, the application will attempt to use a Neo4j instance running on the same machine as this application started on the standard port 7474. IT WILL DESTROY ALL THE DATA IN THAT DATABASE AT STARTUP. So if you don't want that to happen please back up any existing database first.

You may notice that there is no data for you to interact with. To fix this hit the following endpoint from your browser or using curl:

http://localhost:5050/api/reload

This will pre-load the Neo4j database with a handful of departments, a dozen or so subjects and teachers, and 200 students. You'll probably want to enrol them in classes...

Stopping the application server

You can stop the application server at any time by pressing Ctrl-C in the console window from where you launched it.

Make it better!

If you'd like to contribute to the development of this application you will need to install:

NodeJS
Bower

The install bower via:

npm install --global bower

Development mode is on by default in Ratpack so you can just hit refresh to see the changes in the application.

sessionbean/neo4j-ogm-university