Movies Example Application

How to use Spring Boot, Spring Data, and Neo4j together.

Spring Data Neo4j enables convenient integration of Neo4j in your Spring-based application. It provides object-graph mapping (OGM) functionality and other features common to the Spring Data projects.

Note	This project uses Spring Data Neo4j 6. The previous version, using SDN 5 + OGM can still be accessed under the https://github.com/neo4j-examples/movies-java-spring-data-neo4j/tree/sdn5+ogm branch.

The example project is described in detail on the Neo4j Developer Site

The project uses Java 11.

Quickstart

First, you need to have a local Neo4j running. The easiest way is Docker. If you have a docker installed locally, than please run

docker run --publish=7474:7474 --publish=7687:7687 -e 'NEO4J_AUTH=neo4j/secret' neo4j:4.1

Another option is to use Neo4j desktop, which can be downloaded from here: http://neo4j.com/download. If you chose that way, install and start as instructed by the desktop application. You need to start a new database inside desktop.

After you have Neo4j up and running, open up a browser and goto http://localhost:7474. Enter the credentials (neo4j:secret if you chose the Docker approach above or the credentials you supplied in Neo4j Desktop). Then
Run :play movies command, and click and run the Cypher statement to insert the dataset
Clone this project from GitHub
Update src/main/resources/application.properties with the username and password you set above.
Run the project with ./mvnw spring-boot:run

Code Walkthrough

To use Neo4j with Spring Data Neo4j, you just add the dependency for Spring-Boot and Spring-Data-Neo4j to your build setup.

pom.xml

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-neo4j</artifactId>
</dependency>

role=include

Describe your domain model with @Node, @Relationship and @RelationshipProperties.

Excerpt of the domain model in this application. Accessor are omitted for brevity.

@Node
public class Movie {

	@Id
	private final String title;

	@Property("tagline")
	private final String description;

	@Relationship(type = "ACTED_IN", direction = Direction.INCOMING)
	private List<Actor> actors = new ArrayList<>();

	@Relationship(type = "DIRECTED", direction = Direction.INCOMING)
	private List<Person> directors = new ArrayList<>();

	private Integer released;

	public Movie(String title, String description) {
		this.title = title;
		this.description = description;
	}
}

@RelationshipProperties
public class Actor {

	@TargetNode
	private final Person person;

	private List<String> roles = new ArrayList<>();

	public Actor(Person person) {
		this.person = person;
	}
}

@Node
public class Person {

	@Id
	private final String name;

	private Integer born;

	public Person(Integer born, String name) {
		this.born = born;
		this.name = name;
	}
}

Those are interface based DAO implementation. Depending whether you extend from Repository, CrudRepository or Neo4jRepository, they declare a lot of functionality out of the box. We went with a minimalistic "declare things as needed"-approach.

MovieRepository.java

interface MovieRepository extends Repository<Movie, String> {

	List<Movie> findAll();

	Optional<Movie> findById(String title);

	Optional<Movie> findOneByTitle(String title);

	List<Movie> findAllByTitleLikeIgnoreCase(String title);

	List<Movie> findAllByDirectorsName(String name);

	List<Movie> findAllByActorsPersonName(String name);
}

In addition, you can choose to use the Neo4jTemplate to access your domain without repositories or the Neo4jClient to access the Neo4j database inside Spring transactions but without mapping at all.

And last but not least, you can use the pure driver as we show in MovieService. We have no need for Spring transactions or mapping here, as we want to compute just a different graph representation for a front end visualization.

We added https://springdoc.org to documente our rest endpoints.

The Stack

These are the components of our Web Application:

Application Type: Spring-Boot Java Web Application
Web framework: Spring-Boot enabled Spring-WebMVC, Spring-Data-Rest
Persistence Access: Spring-Data-Neo4j 6.x
Database: Neo4j-Server 4.x
Frontend: jquery, bootstrap, d3.js
OpenAPI Documentation: SpringDoc

Endpoints:

Goto http://localhost:8080/docs to access the OpenAPI Swagger documentation for the endpoints we expose. The generated documentation comes with cURL commands you can run in most environments from your favorite terminal.

Goto http://localhost:8080 for a visualization and some interaction with this web application. The REST endpoints are designed to be used with the frontend of https://github.com/neo4j-examples/neo4j-movies-template.

shreyateeza/movies-java-spring-data-neo4j

Movies Example Application

Quickstart

Code Walkthrough

The Stack

Endpoints: