Deploying Neo4j database

Question

so I developed a small Neo4j database with the aim of providing users with path-related information (shortest path from A to B and properties of individual sections of the path). My programming skills are very basic, but I want to make the database very user-friendly.

Basically, I would like to have a screen where users can choose start location and end location from dropdown lists, click a button, and the results (shortest path, distance of the path, properties of the path segments) will appear. For example, if this database had been made in MS Access, I would have made a form, where users could choose the locations, then click a control button which would have executed a query and produced results on a nice report.

Please note that all the nodes, relationships and queries are already in place. All I am looking for are some tips regarding the most user-friendly way of making the information accessible to the users.

Currently, all I can do is make the users install neo4j, run neo4j every time they need it, open the browser, run the cypher script and then edit the cypher script (write down strings as locations) and then execute the query. This makes it rather impractical for users and also I am worried that some user might corrupt the data,

Answer 1

I general you would write an tiny (web/desktop/forms-)application that contains the form, takes the form values and issues the cypher requests with the form values as parameters.

The results can then be rendered as a table or chart or whatever.

You could even run this from Excel or Access with a Macro (using the Neo4j http endpoint).

Depending on your programming skills (which programming language can you write in) it can be anything. There is also a Neo4j .Net client (see http://neo4j.com/developer/dotnet).

And it's author Tatham Oddie showed a while ago how to do that with Excel

Answer 2

I'd suggest making a web application using a web framework like Rails, especially if you're new to programming. You can use the neo4j gem for that to connect to your database and create models to access the data in a friendly way:

https://github.com/neo4jrb/neo4j

I'm one of the maintainers of that gem, so feel free to contact us if you have any questions:

neo4jrb@googlegroups.com

http://twitter.com/neo4jrb

Also, you might be interested in look at my newest project called meta model:

https://github.com/neo4jrb/meta_model

It's a Rails app that lets you define via the web app UI your database model (or at least part of it) and then browse/edit the objects via the web app. It's still very much preliminary, but I'd like to be able to things like what you're talking about (letting users examing data and the relationships between them in a user friendly way)