CODEWITHSUNDEEP
neo4jcypher
pewpewlasers
pewpewlasers

Reputation: 3225

Implement privacy settings in status updates in Neo4j database

Social Networks nowadays allow a user to set privacy settings for each post. For example in Facebook a user can set privacy setting of a status update to "just me", "friends", "public" etc. How would one design such a system in Neo4j (no documentation on something like this)?

One way would be to set a property for each post. But this doesn't look scalable as this feature cannot be extended to something like "share with group 1" (Assuming users are allowed to create their own groups (or circles in google+)). Also, when a user tries to access the newsfeed, merging separate results from "just me", "friends", "public" sounds like a nightmare.

Any suggestions?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 126

Answers (1)

Michael Hunger
Michael Hunger

Reputation: 41706

For the sharing-level I'd set a label on the content (:SharePublic (or leave that off) :ShareFriends, :ShareGroup, :ShareIndividual)

For groups and individuals create a relationship from the content.

To aggregate the newsfeed for a user

Until limit

  1. go over potential news items
  2. allow public
  3. allow individual if pointing to me
  4. allow group if pointing to one of my groups
  5. allow friend if friend with author (check if there is a friendship rel from me to author)

As the feed is a core high performance use-case I'd probably not do it in cypher but a server extension.

Cypher "pseudocode"

MATCH (u:User {login:{login}})
MATCH (:Head)-[:NEXT*1000]->(p:Post)
WHERE p:SharePublic 
OR p:ShareIndividual AND (p)-[:SHARED_WITH]->(u)
OR p:ShareFriend AND (p)<-[:AUTHOR]-()-[:FRIEND]-(u)
OR p:ShareGroup AND  (p)-[:SHARED_WITH]->(:Group)<-[:IN_GROUP]-(u)
RETURN p
LIMIT 30

Upvotes: 2

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