Property, structural, and composite values

A property type value is one that can be stored as a node or relationship property.

The following data types are included in the property types category: Boolean, Date, DateTime, Duration, Float, Integer, List, LocalTime LocalDateTime, Point, String, and Time.

Homogeneous lists of simple types can be stored as properties, although lists in general (see Composite types) cannot be stored as properties.

Cypher also provides pass-through support for byte arrays, which can be stored as property values. Byte arrays are supported for performance reasons, since using Cypher’s generic language type, List of Integer (where each Integer has a 64-bit representation), would be too costly. However, byte arrays are not considered a first class data type by Cypher, so they do not have a literal representation.

The following data types are included in the structural types category: Node, Relationship, and Path.

The Node data type includes: Id, Label(s), and a Map (of properties). Note that labels are not values, but a form of pattern syntax.

The Relationship data type includes: Id, Type, Map (of properties), start node Id, and end node Id.

The Path data type is an alternating sequence of nodes and relationships.

The following data types are included in the composite types category: List and Map.

The List data type can be either a homogenous collection of simple values, or a heterogeneous, ordered collection of values, each of which can have any property, structural or composite type.

The Map data type is a heterogeneous, unordered collection of (Key, Value) pairs, where Key is a literal and Value can have any property, structural, or composite type.

Composite values can also contain null. For more details, see working with null.

The below table provides more detailed information about the various property types that Cypher supports. Note that Cypher types are implemented using Java, and that below table references Java value constants.