Search bar

Bloom is a search-first environment for you to explore your graph. To provide this experience, the search bar supports several types of search input. When you enter a term or phrase in the search bar, Bloom provides a list of suggestions for queries you can run, based on matches in the following input types:

  • Search phrase

  • Graph pattern

  • Full-text search

  • Actions

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You can press <TAB> or click on a suggestion in the list to select it, or scroll to the suggestion and press ENTER to run it.

See Experimental Search feature below for an introduction to the new experimental search feature which gives you helpful hints when using the search bar.

Sample Search phrase

When Bloom autogenerates a Perspective (see Creating a Perspective for more information) or when you create your own (non-empty) Perspective, Bloom provides a sample Search phrase to help you see the data in your graph. The Search phrase is called Show me a graph and is available in the search bar. It returns a sample of your data.

show me a graph

Graph pattern

Graph patterns are a relaxed, near-natural language grammar based on a vocabulary drawn from node labels, relationship types and property keys and indexed property values, enriched by categories or other configuration as defined in the applied Perspective (see Perspectives for more detail). Terms that Bloom detects are used to create potential pattern matches, are added to the suggestions list, from which you can pick the one you wish to query. See Graph pattern search for tips on graph pattern searching.

Search phrase

A Search phrase is essentially an alias for a pre-defined graph query, which is saved within a Perspective. Search phrases allow for user-friendly access to queries that need to be run frequently, or can’t be conveniently expressed as a search pattern. Search phrases also allow for highly customized domain-specific questions to be asked, and can:

  • be paired with a parameterized Cypher query.

  • call algorithms, or anything else that can be called using procedures.

  • modify the graph (requires write access).

See Search phrases for advanced queries tutorial topic for tips on using Search phrases.

Full-text search

When Bloom can’t find an appropriate suggestion for the entered search term, you have the ability to run a full-text search against the Neo4j database. Bloom uses the native full-text indexes in the database for this feature. You will need to set up a full-text index to enable full-text search in Bloom. Without any full-text index configured, Bloom will fall back to searching in all available indexed string properties.

See Full-text search tutorial topic for tips on using the full-text search option.

Actions

Actions are phrases that trigger user-interface commands when typed in the search bar, e.g. Clear Scene will empty the canvas of the currently shown nodes and relationships. This lists some of the available Actions:

  • Invert selection - selects every unselected node and deselects any selected node/s.

  • Fit to selection - zooms in on the selection and centers it on the canvas.

  • Expand selection - option to see everything directly connected to the selected node/s.

  • Clear Scene - empty the canvas.

  • Dismiss - removes everything selected.

  • Dismiss others - removes everything not selected.

  • Refresh Data - refreshes the data on the canvas.

  • Redo - repeat the latest action.

  • Undo - undo the latest action.

See Default actions and shortcuts for the complete list and associated keyboard shortcuts.

This feature is experimental, which means that in order to use it, you have to first enable experimental features from the Settings drawer and then enable the feature from the Experimental drawer.

You can either use this for graph pattern search or for full-text search.

Graph pattern

When you go to the search bar, Bloom presents options to begin your search. You can select from any node labels available in the Perspective or use a blank (any) node. Further, if you know which relationship you are interested in, but not which node labels it connects, you can select based on the relationship type and use the wildcard option for the node label (the (any) node).

exp graph pattern

If you select a node label, Product for example, Bloom lets you choose if you want to further filter on the start node by its properties or if you want to move directly to the relationship.

label property

If you select Property, you can see all properties for the Product label and if you pick discontinued for example, you can then specify the condition, for example true. This results in a pattern that starts with a discontinued product and filters all other nodes, both the ones with other labels as well as the Product nodes where the discontinued property does not equal true.

From here, you can either press the play icon to display all discontinued products, or you can continue defining your graph pattern.

When you are happy with the start node, select Relationship to see a list of available relationship types for your specified start node, both incoming and outgoing. Similarly, you can further filter on properties for the relationship, if available.

The last step is to specify the end node, which naturally follows the same steps as the start node. The wildcard option, (any), is available here as well.

Press the play icon when you are ready to execute the search.

Note that this extended graph pattern search only allows for a pattern of two nodes and one relationship, for the time being, but longer patterns will be enabled in the future.

Full-text

To use the full-text search, a full-text index needs to be present in the database.

Using the experimental full-text search is not vastly different from the already available full-text search, but you are provided with more constructive feedback when searching for things that yield no results.

You have to enter at least three characters for a full-text search and only exact matches are returned. For example, if you type cond while looking for product categories, only Condiments is returned and not Confections, but if you type prod instead, you get both Produce and Dairy Products. However, if your full-text search contains multiple words, the returned results contain at least one of the words. Select the full-text search entry and press the play icon to perform the search.

Also worth noting is that if only nodes (and not relationships) are matched by the full-text search, only nodes are returned, but if only relationships are matched, these are returned with the nodes they connect.