Neo4j 2.0.0-M06 - Introducing Neo4j's Browser

By Neo4j Staff | October 15, 2013

Type in a Cypher query, hit <enter>, then watch a graph visualization unfold. Want some data? Switch to the table view and download as CSV. Neo4j’s new Browser interface is a fluid developer experience, with iterative query authoring and graph visualization.

Available today in Neo4j 2.0.0 Milestone 6, download now to try out this shiny new user interface.

Cypher Authoring
Neo4j Browser is like a mashup of a REPL and a lightweight IDE, sprinkled with pretty graphs (ooh, ahh). Writing and running Cypher queries is the center of all the action, which happens in the editor along the top. Just type in a single-line query and hit <enter>. You’ll get a result frame in the stream, showing either a table of property data or a graph visualization of nodes and relationships.

Type another query, get another frame. Tap the up arrow to retrieve a previous entry, edit, then run it again.

For larger queries, hit <shift-enter> to switch into multi-line editor mode. Now you’ll need to use <ctrl-enter> to run, and <ctrl> up or down arrow to navigate history (the modifier also works in single-line mode).

Finally, and thankfully, you can save scripts. Hit the star button to save the current editor content, which will be available in the sidebar. By convention, the first line can be a comment which will be used as the name of the query. You can even drag-and-drop in scripts, for sharing queries or small-scale data import.

Query result visualization
To show your proud parents (or maybe boss) the work you’ve been doing, nothing beats graph visualization to explain what’s going on. All exploration starts with a Cypher query that returns nodes or relationships.

Click on any node or relationship in the visualization to bring up an inspector which will reveal its properties. Switch to the inspector’s styling tab to tweak the colors and content, based on node label or relationship type.

Developer’s Friend
A primary design goal of Neo4j Browser is that every interaction is a demonstration. It should be capable enough to get things done, while recognizing that your main interest is developing an application. Any “buttons” which do anything work by running queries or commands which you can learn from.

All the actions in the sidebar works like that, using client-side commands to run queries, interact with the REST api, or load content like help pages and mini guides. The interface should do things for you, but also show you how things are done so you can smoothly transition into application development.

Result frames adopt that perspective by being both meaningful and useful: examine the result data, then click a button to download raw JSON results or a CSV table.

We’ve got plans for extending this approach to make this a tool which integrates with your everyday workflows, whether debugging, prototyping, or exploring. Got some ideas of your own? Let us know how you use Neo4j on a daily basis.
Your turn

Neo4j Browser debuted at the recent Graph Connect in San Francisco, with a live preview during the keynote. You can get it today.

Download Neo4j 2.0.0-M06
Ask questions on Stack Overflow
Discuss ideas on our Google Group

Thanks to everyone who helped beta-test the new interface.

Cheers,
Andreas

Want to learn more about graph databases? Click below to get your free copy of O’Reilly’s Graph Databases ebook and discover how to use graph technologies for your application today.

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Keywords: csv • cypher • Cypher Query • IDE • json • Neo4j Browser • Query result visualization • REPL

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25 Comments

David Bigelow says:

October 15, 2013 at 8:10 pm

Brilliant! Looks amazing!

Anonymous says:

October 15, 2013 at 8:10 pm

Brilliant! Looks amazing!

Michael says:

October 16, 2013 at 8:35 am

Neo4j just became better… I just wish it was possible to change the graph scale ("à la" GoogleMaps).

Unknown says:

October 16, 2013 at 8:50 am

This looks great. Can't wait for the download to finish.

Peter Neubauer says:

October 16, 2013 at 8:57 am

@Michael feel free to try out to add customizable widgets as Frames and give us a Pull Request! I guess generic widgets need to assume some structure to the nodes in question, in this case some Lat/Lon attribues being present on all nodes to be visualized.

Anonymous says:

October 16, 2013 at 11:51 am

With the new 2.0.0-M06 it is said that there is a new Web-UI but I can't find any differences between 1.9 and 2.0 as long as Web-UI is concerned. Am I missing something ?

Peter Neubauer says:

October 16, 2013 at 11:56 am

Are you sure you have stopped and uninstalled your previous neo4j installation?

Peter Neubauer says:

October 16, 2013 at 12:18 pm

http://127.0.0.1:7474/webadmin/ is the old UI, http://127.0.0.1:7474/browser/ or http://127.0.0.1:7474/ is the new one.

Andreas Kollegger says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:28 pm

@Michael We will continue to evolve the graph visualization, and have considered different approaches to zooming and also panning. From an information visualization perspective, could you share what you're trying to achieve with changing the graph scale?

Anonymous says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:43 pm

@Peter Thanks for the heads up, I didn't know there was a new URL for the new UI.

Nat Pryce says:

October 17, 2013 at 8:58 am

Lovely. Is there a video of the new browser in action somewhere online?

Jeff Altman says:

October 18, 2013 at 6:52 pm

Hi – Looks great. How do I access the styling tab to change node colors,change the display, etc?

Yossi says:

October 20, 2013 at 8:38 pm

Sounds great Would it be possible in the future to open the visual graph results as a portlet from within the application using it?

Anonymous says:

October 21, 2013 at 10:47 am

Looks nice! Were there any changes made to cypher (i.e. MERGE) or the transactional server endpoint in M06? If so, is there a changelog or more detailed release notes somewhere? See none on the download page.

Peter Neubauer says:

October 21, 2013 at 10:55 am

Hi there, the changelog in more details is at https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/blob/master/packaging/standalone/standalone-enterprise/src/main/distribution/text/enterprise/CHANGES.txt

Ramon says:

October 24, 2013 at 1:32 pm

Thank you for this new webadmin. It's like a gift from heaven. Is there any way to clear the results though? I had to click trash icon on every result to clear the log. Sorry some people are OCD that way, typing "clear" a couple of times on terminals when they get too long.

Andreas Kollegger says:

October 24, 2013 at 3:48 pm

@ramon Try the :clear command. 😉

netcrush says:

October 24, 2013 at 8:27 pm

Great work done! Congrats! I have created one node with label "Person" and property "name". Then I have removed this node, but the label and the property are still staying remembered in sidebar on the left. Is there any way to remove properties, labels and relationships that are no longer exists in database from the left sidebar? Or to say: to refresh the sidebar

Ramon says:

October 24, 2013 at 9:11 pm

@Andreas Kollegger: Thank you so much! I'd also like to know how to delete from the sidebar the labels that are no longer there. Loving everything so far!!!

Andreas Kollegger says:

October 24, 2013 at 11:07 pm

The labels and types in the sidebar are, at the moment, a quirk of the database itself. Even if you delete all the nodes and relationships, the "meta" constructs remain.

Ameer Nuri says:

November 3, 2013 at 12:44 pm

awesome :) when will it be available on heroku?

Michael Hunger says:

November 26, 2013 at 9:15 pm

@Ameer Nuri, check out http://graphenedb.com for the lastest hosted Neo4j releases.

wolfgang says:

May 20, 2014 at 3:34 pm

first said i really love the Neo4J Browser, great job!

is it possible to redefine the default query of a double click on a node? this would be a very useful feature, because at the moment it just opens all related nodes which in most cases reaches the max. node limit.

a user defineable click cypher query would solve a lot of troubles.

Andreas Kollegger says:

May 22, 2014 at 9:04 pm

That’s a good suggestion. I agree with the observation that the node-expansion behavior isn’t great. We’re looking into how that can be re-designed to handle this scenario. A user-definable query is an interesting possibility.

Thanks,
Andreas

Neo4j: Cypher – Neo.ClientError.Statement.ParameterMissing and neo4j-shell at Mark Needham says:

May 31, 2014 at 2:45 pm

[…] Every now and then I get sent Neo4j cypher queries to look at and more often than not they’re parameterised which means you can’t easily run them in the Neo4j browser. […]