Querying with Cypher

[adam_cowley]

Let us look at some examples of the syntax we have learned so far using MATCH and RETURN keywords. Each example will start with an explanation of what we are trying to achieve and have an image below of the results of the query run in Neo4j Browser.

• Example 1: Find the labeled Person nodes in the graph. Note that we must use a variable like p for the Person node if we want retrieve the node in the RETURN clause.

MATCH (p:Person)
RETURN p

• Example 2: Find Person nodes in the graph that have a name of 'Jennifer'. Remember that we can name our variable anything we want, as long as we reference that same name later.

MATCH (jenn:Person {name: 'Jennifer'})
RETURN jenn

• Example 3: Find which Company Jennifer works for.

Explanation: we know we need to find Jennifer’s Person node, and we need to find the Company node she is connected to. To do that, we need to follow the WORKS_FOR relationship from Jennifer’s Person node to the Company node. We have also specified a label of Company so that the query will only look at nodes with that label. Since we only care about returning the company in this query, we need to give that node a variable (company) but do not need to give variables for the Person node or WORKS_FOR relationship.

MATCH (:Person {name: 'Jennifer'})-[:WORKS_FOR]->(company:Company)
RETURN company

• Example 4: Find which Company Jennifer works for, but this time, return only the name of the company.

Explanation: this query is very similar to Example 3. Example 3 returned the entire Company node with all its properties. For this example, we still need to find Jennifer’s company, but now we only care about its name. We will need to access the node’s name property using the syntax variable.property to return the name value.

MATCH (:Person {name: 'Jennifer'})-[:WORKS_FOR]->(company:Company)
RETURN company.name

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://neo4j.com/developer/cypher/querying/