Get Query Results as JSON programmatically

Drivers & Stacks Java
#1

I am pretty new to Neo4J and currently using the neo4j-java-driver with bolt for accessing the DB and sending (possible) results back to a frontend. This API will obviously be written in Java and provide REST endpoints with JSON as payload.

Now, should I

  1. somehow transform the query results to JSON (e.g. by using gson) in order to send them
  2. rather use the jdbc-driver
  3. or the REST API of my Neo4J DB?
  4. -- or what else would be the recommended way?

Optional question: I am searching the web for quite some time regarding those questions, but it seems not to be a common task to use the results as JSON. Is this right and if yes, why?

My SO-Question is probably too confused, confusing and naive, but you might find additional information there.

#2

The best way to do this is to serialize a ResultSet object that comes back from a query as JSON.

But there are some kinks to be aware of when you do this.

  • Type compatibility: Neo4j numbers are java Longs, which can represent a wider range of values than JavaScript Number. So be careful when dealing with numeric fields; converting to a Number is too simple and won't always work.
  • Reactive drivers / result size: usually when people want to serialize a resultset as a document, they might not always realize that a document is one big chunk. This is a bad idea if you have a very large number of results.

For this, it doesn't really matter if you use the official Neo4j java client or some other language, the considerations are basically the same.