Feature Request for a toJSON method

[ariesshrimp]

So far I find this pattern pretty frustrating:

// I know I'm getting just one result
session.run(query, params).then(({ records }) => records[0].get(some_key).properties)

// I know I'm getting a list of results
session.run(query, params).then(({ records }) => records.map(r => r.get(some_key).properties)

I'm sure there are lots of use cases for all of that other machinery on the response, but a quick "just give me some json that looks like my data" method would be sublimely convenient.

[legraphista]

Hi @joefraley,

There is a method called .toObject() coming in 1.1.
You can find it here: https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j-javascript-driver/blob/1.1/src/v1/record.js#L84-L91

[lutovich]

Hi @joefraley,

Thanks for raising this issue. What do you think about the solution suggested/added by @legraphista?

[ariesshrimp]

Yeah, that's the idea. Are you open to making the method return a promise instead? A record could be pretty large. I'm thinking of the browser API fetch, whose response object has a json() method that does basically the same thing.

[lutovich]

@joefraley method toObject() iterates over data that is already in memory, it does not perform network calls and does not fetch things lazily. That is why I think it is reasonable to have it return just an object. What do you think?

[ariesshrimp]

That makes sense, I guess the value unwrapping would always happen in a promise chain anyway (after session.run()). I think there could be user performance gains by liberating the event loop, but they would only be noticeable for very large records. I think it's fine to leave toObject() as a synchronous operation. 👌

[sean-stanley]

Actually I tried using your toObject as is and it could benefit from some refinement for easy use still.

Basically for easy objectifying we want the keys and _fields array zipped together so that

 const keys = { keys: ['n._id', 'n.name'] }
const fields = { _fields: ['123124', 'Joe'] }

becomes the standard form { _id: '123124', name: 'joe' }

maybe there is a way to get closer to this kind of thing already? I am just learning neo4j and cypher now.

[lutovich]

Hi @sean-stanley,

I think you can achieve this using aliases in Cypher.
Presumably your current query looks smth like MATCH (n) RETURN n._id, n.name. If you change it to MATCH (n) RETURN n._id AS _id, n.name AS name resulting object should be {_id: ..., name: ...}.

Hope this helps.

[jexp]

Hey @sean-stanley our colleague @oskarhane provided such a function in this demo:

https://jsfiddle.net/oskarhane/amxrwkmo/

[ariesshrimp]

@sean-stanley that's exactly what I expected actually, I haven't tried the method yet.

@lutovich I haven't run into any case where I would rather RETURN n.name AS name in my query than simply have the keys and values zipped together by toObject()

If you did RETURN n.name AS name and toObject() had zip behavior, would things break? Maybe that's the problem: being forced to support possible cypher queries of that form.

[sean-stanley]

Actually it does behave as expected my bad. I setup a sample case incorrectly. Using the n.name as name method also works well. It's a bit annoying when you need half a dozen fields to do that but for the simple queries it worked well.