Trying to create a recipes graph by importing collection from MongoDB

[sjustinianoclar]

My goal is to connect a MongoDB database of different recipes with Neo4j and create a graph with the recipes and their corresponding ingredients.

I am using Neo4j Desktop version 1.3.4, and would like to read some documents from a collection in MongoDB. Each document would look like the following:

{"id": 0001, "title": title, "ingredients": [A,B,C]}

Can I obtain my goal with any of the functions from apoc? Because I cannot find any (I assume they exist) method that allows to pick a JSON like the one above and create some nodes and relations between this nodes using the keys and values from the JSON itself. The desired graph would look like:

(Ingredient A) <----- [has] ---- (Recipe) ---- [has] ----> (Ingredient B)

Can Neo4j achieve this somehow?

Thank you for reading.

[tony_chiboucas · Accepted solution]

Neo4j Graph Database Platform

Load JSON - Neo4j Graph Database Platform

This section describes procedures that can be used to import JSON data from web APIs or files.

apoc.load.json

...is probably one of the most used procedures in APOC. I'm using it a lot in my own project. Here's one of my cypher scripts combining periodic.commit with load.json, to handle large volumes of data.

Here's a short example, using a valid tweak of your json:

Source data at url: https://example.com/data/bakery.json

{
    "documents" :  [
        {"id": 1001, "title": "Cake", "ingredients": ["flour","eggs","sugar"]},
        {"id": 1002, "title": "Cookie", "ingredients": ["flour","eggs","sugar","chocolate"]}
    ]
}

Cypher

CALL apoc.load.json("https://example.com/data/bakery.json") YIELD value
UNWIND value.documents AS doc
  MERGE (d:Document {id: doc.id})
  SET d.title = doc.title

  UNWIND doc.ingredients as ingredient
    MERGE (i:Ingredient {name: ingredient})
    MERGE (d)-[:USES]->(i)

I'd advise putting ingredient quantities in the :USES relationship once you have them:

...
MERGE (d)-[u:Uses]->(i)
  SET u.unit = "cup"
  SET u.amount = "1.5"
  SET u.readable = "1 1/2 cups"
  SET u.ml = 350

Recipes come with many other complex patterns, like ordered steps, time/temp, methods. Those will get fun and interesting very quickly, if you're going to dive that deep. You could also, just as easily, stick the steps and explanation as text on the :Document node, and not worry about graphing it at all.