Issue with Node Persistence: Actor Node Updated When Movie Node is Updated

Drivers & Stacks Spring Data Neo4j & Neo4j-OGM
1

I’m encountering an issue with node persistence in my project. I have two nodes: Movie and Actor . The Movie node has a property of Actor . Here’s a simplified version of my code:

@Node
class Movie {
    String title;
    Actor topActor;
}

@Node
class Actor {
    String name;
}

When I create and save a Movie and an Actor like this:

Movie movie = new Movie("Polar Express");
Actor actor = new Actor("Tom Hanks");

movie.setTopActor(actor);

Both the Movie and Actor nodes get saved, which is expected.
However,

movie.setLength("1:26");

when I update the Movie node, the updatedAt field of both the Movie and Actor nodes gets updated. I expected only the updatedAt field of the Movie node to be updated.

Can anyone explain why this is happening and how I can prevent the updatedAt field of the Actor node from being updated when only the Movie node is updated?

2

How are you updating it? Can you share the code?

Your domain object is the movie node. I assume you are finding it, updating the movie attribute, then saving the movie node. I believe the entire movie node gets recreated, which includes the actor node, when you save. You can see this if you turn on logging. It will log the cypher statements.

3

The explanation given by @glilienfield is correct. Spring Data Neo4j will traverse through all reachable objects and update them (even if there isn't anything to update). This will update the updated values.

You can statically block those updates but would require to take care of the updates of the Actor when needed with its own repository.
The @Relationship annotation has a newer property cascadeUpdates. If set to false, SDN will not process the related entity when you are persisting the class where the relationship is defined. In your case the Movie class.

4

The issue you're facing is as follows:

@Node
class Movie {
    String title;
    @Relationship(type = "HAS", direction = Relationship.Direction.INCOMING, cascadeUpdates = false)
    Actor topActor;
}

@Node
class Actor {
    String name;
    @Relationship(type = "HAS", direction = Relationship.Direction.INCOMING)
    private AdditionalDetails additionalDetails;
}

@Node
class AdditionalDetails {
    String address;
    String location;
}

In this case, you want to save the Actor along with AdditionalDetails, so cascadeUpdates should be true by default. However, when you're saving the Movie, the Actor is not getting updated because cascadeUpdates is set to false, but its updating AdditionalDetails Why ???
Expected behavior: On Movie update Only the Movie should be updated.
On Actor update The Actor and AdditionalDetails both should get updated

5

@gerrit.meier @glilienfield can you help us with the above one