CODEWITHSUNDEEP
dateneo4jcyphergraph-databases
Marco Rossi
Marco Rossi

Reputation: 239

Storing dates as nodes in Neo4j

I'm new to Neo4j so maybe I'm just completely wrong on this, but I'll give it a try!

Our data is mostly composed by reservations, users and facilities stored as nodes.
I need both to count the total reservations that occurred in a specific time frame and the overall income (stored as reservation.income) in this timeframe.

I was thinking to overcome the problem by creating the date as a node, in this way I can assign a relationship [:PURCHASED_ON] to all the reservations that occurred on a specific date.

As far as I've understood, creating the date as a node could give me a few pros:

Basicly, I was thinking about doing something like this 

CREATE (d:Day {name:01/11/2016 day: TOINT(01), month: TOINT(11), year: TOINT(2016)}

I have seen that a possible solution could be to create a node for every year, every month (1-12) and every day (1-31), but I think that would just complicate terribly the architecture of my Graph since every reservation has an "insert_date" (the day it's created) and then the official "reservation_date" (the day it's due).

Am I onto something here or is it just a waste of time? Thanks!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1485

Answers (2)

InverseFalcon
InverseFalcon

Reputation: 30407

You may want to look at the GraphAware TimeTree library, as date handling is a complex thing, and this seems to be the logical conclusion of the direction you're going. The TimeTree also has support for finding events attached to your time tree between date ranges, at which point you can perform further operations (counting, summing of income, etc).

Upvotes: 2

cybersam
cybersam

Reputation: 67019

There are many date/time functions in the APOC plugin that you should take a look at.

As an example, you can use apoc.date.fields (incorrectly called by the obsolete name apoc.date.fieldsFormatted in the APOC doc) to get the year, month, day to put in your node:

WITH '01/11/2016' AS d
WITH apoc.date.fields(d, 'MM/dd/yyyy') AS f
CREATE (d:Day {name: d, day: f.days, month: f.month, year: f.years});

NOTE: The properties in the returned map have names that are oddly plural. I have submitted an issue requesting that the names be made singluar.

Upvotes: 1

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