Cypher Fundamentals-Filtering Queries

Cypher Fundamentals

Reading Data from Neo4j

• Introduction to Cypher
• Retrieving Nodes
• Finding Relationships
• Traversing Relationships
• Finding Emil
• Filtering Queries
• Finding Specific Actors

Writing Data to Neo4j

• Creating Nodes
• Creating a Node
• Creating Relationships
• Creating a Relationship
• Updating Properties
• Adding Properties to a Movie
• Merge Processing
• Adding or Updating a Movie
• Deleting Data
• Deleting Emil

QUIZ

Filtering Queries

VideoTranscript

 

Filtering queries

Earlier, you learned that the WHERE clause is used to tell the query engine to filter what nodes are retrieved from the graph. In this lesson you will learn about some of the ways that you can filter your queries.

You have already learned how you can test equality for properties of a node and how you can use logical expressions to further filter what you want to retrieve.

For example, this query retrieves the Person nodes and Movie nodes where the person acted in a movie that was released in 2008 or 2009:

cypher

 

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MATCH (p:Person)-[:ACTED_IN]->(m:Movie)
WHERE m.released = 2008 OR m.released = 2009
RETURN p, m

Filtering by node labels

You have already seen this type of query. It returns the names of all people who acted in the movie, The Matrix.

cypher

 

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MATCH (p:Person)-[:ACTED_IN]->(m:Movie)
WHERE m.title='The Matrix'
RETURN p.name

An alternative to this query is the following where we test the node labels in the WHERE clause:

cypher

 

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MATCH (p)-[:ACTED_IN]->(m)
WHERE p:Person AND m:Movie AND m.title='The Matrix'
RETURN p.name

Both queries execute the same way, but you may want to use one style of filtering over another in your code.

Filtering using ranges

You can specify a range for filtering a query. Here we want to retrieve Person nodes of people who acted in movies released between 2000 and 2003:

cypher

 

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MATCH (p:Person)-[:ACTED_IN]->(m:Movie)
WHERE 2000 <= m.released <= 2003
RETURN p.name, m.title, m.released

Filtering by existence of a property

Recall that by default, there is no requirement that a node or relationship has a given property. Here is an example of a query where we only want to return Movie nodes where Jack Nicholson acted in the movie, and the movie has the tagline property.

cypher

 

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MATCH (p:Person)-[:ACTED_IN]->(m:Movie)
WHERE p.name='Jack Nicholson' AND m.tagline IS NOT NULL
RETURN m.title, m.tagline

Filtering by partial strings

Cypher has a set of string-related keywords that you can use in your WHERE clauses to test string property values. You can specify STARTS WITH, ENDS WITH, and CONTAINS.

For example, to find all actors in the graph whose first name is Michael, you would write:

cypher

 

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MATCH (p:Person)-[:ACTED_IN]->()
WHERE p.name STARTS WITH 'Michael'
RETURN p.name

String tests are case-sensitive so you may need to use the toLower() or toUpper() functions to ensure the test yields the correct results. For example:

cypher

 

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MATCH (p:Person)-[:ACTED_IN]->()
WHERE toLower(p.name) STARTS WITH 'michael'
RETURN p.name

Filtering by patterns in the graph

Suppose you wanted to find all people who wrote a movie but did not direct that same movie. Here is how you would perform the query:

cypher

 

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MATCH (p:Person)-[:WROTE]->(m:Movie)
WHERE NOT exists( (p)-[:DIRECTED]->(m) )
RETURN p.name, m.title

Filtering using lists

If you have a set of values you want to test with, you can place them in a list or you can test with an existing list in the graph. A Cypher list is a comma-separated set of values within square brackets.

You can define the list in the WHERE clause. During the query, the graph engine will compare each property with the values IN the list. You can place either numeric or string values in the list, but typically, elements of the list are of the same type of data. If you are testing with a property of a string type, then all the elements of the list will be strings.

In this example, we only want to retrieve Person nodes of people born in 1965, 1970, or 1975:

cypher

 

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MATCH (p:Person)
WHERE p.born IN [1965, 1970, 1975]
RETURN p.name, p.born

You can also compare a value to an existing list in the graph.

We know that the :ACTED_IN relationship has a property, roles that contains the list of roles an actor had in a particular movie they acted in. Here is the query we write to return the name of the actor who played Neo in the movie The Matrix:

cypher

 

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MATCH (p:Person)-[r:ACTED_IN]->(m:Movie)
WHERE  'Neo' IN r.roles AND m.title='The Matrix'
RETURN p.name, r.roles

Check your understanding

1. Filtering a value in a list

Suppose you want to retrieve all movies that have a released property value that is 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, or 2008. Here is an incomplete Cypher example to return the title property values of all movies released in these years. What keyword do you specify in the WHERE clause?

Once you have selected your option, click the Check Results query button to continue.

cypher

 

MATCH (m:Movie)
WHERE m.released

FROM
IN
CONTAINS
IS

 [2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008]
RETURN m.title

2. Finding people born in the seventies.

We want to write a MATCH clause to retrieve all Person nodes for people born in the seventies.

Select the WHERE clauses below that will filter this query properly:

MATCH (a:Person) RETURN a.name, a.born

•  

  WHERE a.born >= 1970 AND a.born < 1980

•  

  WHERE 1970 <= a.born < 1980

•  

  WHERE 1970 < a.born <= 1980

•  

  WHERE a.born IN [1970,1971,1972,1973,1974,1975,1976,1977,1978,1979]

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