Connecting to Neo4j

The Cypher® Builder library helps you compose Cypher queries, but sending these to Neo4j must be done separately through a Neo4j driver. This page demonstrates how you can do that.

Setup the project

Initialize your project by following the instructions in Installation.
To connect to Neo4j, make sure you have both @neo4j/cypher-builder and neo4j-driver installed in your NodeJS project:
```
npm install @neo4j/cypher-builder neo4j-driver
```
For this example, the movies data set is used. Alternatively, you can create entries with the following Cypher®:
```
CREATE(:Movie {title: "The Matrix"})
CREATE(:Movie {title: "The Terminal"})
```

Initialize the driver

Add the following lines to the installation JavaScript file to initialize the driver:

import Cypher from "@neo4j/cypher-builder";
import neo4j from "neo4j-driver";

const driver = neo4j.driver("neo4j://localhost", neo4j.auth.basic("neo4j", "password"));

Construct your Cypher query

You can compose any query by using the Cypher® object. For example:

const movie = new Cypher.Node();
const query = new Cypher.Match(new Cypher.Pattern(movie, { labels: ["Movie"] })).return([
    movie.property("title"),
    "title",
]);

This creates the following query:

MATCH (this0:Movie)
RETURN this0.title AS title

Execute the query

Use .build in the query object to generate the Cypher® query and the necessary parameters to pass to neo4j-driver:

const { cypher, params } = query.build();
const { records } = await driver.executeQuery(cypher, params);

When you are finished, close the driver connection:

await driver.close();

Consume the results

The records object can be consumed as explained in the JavaScript Driver documentation:

for (const record of records) {
    console.log(record.get("title"));
}

For the example data from Setup the project, this yields:

The Matrix
The Terminal

Conclusion

Your script should look like this:

import Cypher from "@neo4j/cypher-builder";
import neo4j from "neo4j-driver";

const driver = neo4j.driver("neo4j://localhost", neo4j.auth.basic("neo4j", "password"));

const movie = new Cypher.Node();
const query = new Cypher.Match(new Cypher.Pattern(movie, { labels: ["Movie"] })).return([
    movie.property("title"),
    "title",
]);

const { cypher, params } = query.build();
const { records } = await driver.executeQuery(cypher, params);

await driver.close();

for (const record of records) {
    console.log(record.get("title"));
}