Help with Implementing Auditing for createdDate, updatedDate, createdBy, updatedBy in Neo4j with Spring Boot

Drivers & Stacks Spring Data Neo4j & Neo4j-OGM
1

I am working on a Spring Boot application with a Neo4j backend, and I need to implement automatic tracking for entity auditing. Specifically, I would like to track createdDate,updatedDate , createdBy and updatedBy

I’ve heard of Neo4j Auditing, but I’m unsure about the complete steps to achieve this. Can someone please guide me on how to achieve

2

The auditing feature is available in Spring Data Neo4j and can be used as shown here in the reference documentation. FAQ :: Spring Data Neo4j
It is really as simple as described. First you activate the auditing mechanism via @EnableNeo4jAuditing. Even without the beans that are mentioned in the example of the documentation, you would get the dates set.
For the principal, you would either have to define a bean like shown in the example or an AuditorAware<T> implementation as shown here Auditing :: Spring Data Neo4j

A side-note on this: You have to use an identifier based on a id generator (like the built-in UUIDGenerator) for this to work 100%. If you have a fixed property for the id that you handle manually, SDN cannot determine if this entity is new or updated on save and won't update the modified fields, because -for defensive save reasons- it assumes the object in those cases always as new.

3 
@SpringBootApplication
@EnableScheduling
@EnableNeo4jAuditing
public class DemoApplication {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		SpringApplication.run(DemoApplication.class, args);
	}

}

@Node
public class MyCard {

    @Id
    private String myId;

    @CreatedBy 
    private User createdBy;

    @CreatedDate 
    private LocalDateTime createdDate;
}

class User implements AuditorAware<String> {

    @Override
    public Optional<String> getCurrentAuditor() {
        return Optional.of("WIFIFIFIFI");
    }
}

I really dont undertsand
what further should I do

4

What is your exact problem? Does it not work at all or won't "just" the @Modified... get updated?

    @Id
    private String myId;

This is exactly the style of identifier to avoid (esp. when dealing with auditing).

5

It's not working at all. I have my own ID
I just don't want to use the auto-generated values. I have my own ID as a string.

Let's say a car is a node. I don't want the autogenerated value as the ID; I will use my own data for the ID. However, I need to track who created the entry, when it was created, who updated it, and when it was updated, i.e., createdAt, createdBy, updatedAt.

7

The problem with the assigned ids is exactly what I was referring to in my comments above. For Spring Data Neo4j an entity with an assigned (self-managed) id is always new unless it has also versioning/optimistic locking enabled (Metadata-based Mapping :: Spring Data Neo4j).
Here is an example for the use of generated UUIDs with auditing (neo4j-issues-examples/discourse-71553 at 4e2fb2d3e079de206624091f90fab1cc143a7127 · meistermeier/neo4j-issues-examples · GitHub) .
While creating it, I figured out that the resulting problem with provided ids and without versioning is not that the modify dates won't get written but it will always be createdAt/By having the same value as the last modify fields.

So either add optimistic locking and stick with the assigned ids..
..or use generated, synthetic ids.