Property types

The following properties are available on nodes and relationships:

AliasProperty

IntegerProperty

ArrayProperty

JSONProperty

BooleanProperty

RegexProperty

DateProperty

StringProperty (Notes)

DateTimeProperty

UniqueIdProperty

DateTimeFormatProperty

PointProperty

FloatProperty

Naming Convention

You can follow standard Python variable naming conventions to name an entity’s properties but please note that a property name should not begin with an underscore (_) character.

Doing so leads to unpredictable results.

By design, neomodel.StructuredNode derived entities reserve a number of protected variables to perform quick look-up operations. The names of those variables begin with an underscore and therefore any member variable that begins with this character is excluded from further processing.

Defaults

Default values can be specified for any property, even as the result of a function or other callable object:

from uuid import uuid4
my_id = StringProperty(unique_index=True, default=uuid4)

And in terms of a function or lambda:

my_datetime = DateTimeProperty(default=lambda: datetime.now(pytz.utc))

Mandatory / Optional Properties

Whether the value of a property is absolutely essential for an entity’s existence or can be left undefined is determined by the required parameter that applies to all properties.

This is a boolean parameter that defaults to False and makes an entity’s properties optional by default.

Setting required=True makes the property mandatory. Mandatory properties cannot have default values and setting both required=True, default will result in a ValueError exception.

It is worth noting here that required=False means that the property’s value can also be None in addition to a valid value. A value of None is different than a value of "" and this can sometimes lead to logical errors.

For example:

class Person(StructuredNode):
    uid = UniqueIdProperty()
    full_name = StringProperty(required = True)
    email = EmailProperty()

Here Person.full_name is mandatory but Person.email is optional. With this definition, the following would fail:

some_person = Person().save()

Because full_name == None but full_name has been marked as required for the definition of Person.

Notice here that the following would fail too:

some_person = Person(full_name="Thomas Edison", email="").save()

In this case the EmailProperty would raise a ValueError to complain that "" does not look like a valid email address.

The email property is optional here which means that its value can be left undefined (None), not that its set of valid values includes the empty string.

Choices

Choices can be specified as a mapping (dict) of valid values for a StringProperty using the choices argument. The mapping’s values are used when displaying information to users:

class Person(StructuredNode):
    SEXES = {'F': 'Female', 'M': 'Male', 'O': 'Other'}
    sex = StringProperty(required=True, choices=SEXES)

tim = Person(sex='M').save()
tim.sex # M
tim.get_sex_display() # 'Male'

The value’s validity will be checked both when saved and loaded from the database.

Array Properties

Neomodel supports neo4j’s arrays via the ArrayProperty class and the class for each list element can optionally be provided as the first argument:

class Person(StructuredNode):
    names = ArrayProperty(StringProperty(), required=True)

bob = Person(names=['bob', 'rob', 'robert']).save()

In this example each element in the list is deflated to a string prior to being persisted.

Unique Identifiers

All nodes in neo4j have an internal id (accessible by the ‘id’ property in neomodel) however these should not be used by an application. Neomodel provides the UniqueIdProperty to generate unique identifiers for nodes (with a unique index):

class Person(StructuredNode):
    uid = UniqueIdProperty()

Person.nodes.get(uid='a12df...')

Dates and times

The DateTimeProperty accepts datetime.datetime objects of any timezone and stores them as a UTC epoch value. These epoch values are inflated to datetime.datetime objects with the UTC timezone set.

Similarly, the DateTimeFormatProperty accepts datetime.datetime objects but stores them as a user defined formatted date string. The pattern is set by the format argument which defaults to “%Y-%m-%d”.

In the following example the datetime will be stored as ‘YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss’:

created = DateTimeFormatProperty(format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")

The DateProperty accepts datetime.date objects which are stored as a string property ‘YYYY-MM-DD’.

In all of the above, the default_now parameter specifies the “current time” (the time a “write” operation takes place) as the default value:

created = DateTimeProperty(default_now=True)

Enforcing a specific timezone is done by setting the config variable NEOMODEL_FORCE_TIMEZONE=1.

Other properties

  • EmailProperty - validate emails (via a regex).

  • RegexProperty - passing in a validator regex: RegexProperty(expression=r’dw’)

  • NormalizedProperty - use one method (normalize) to inflate and deflate.

  • PointProperty - store and validate Spatial Properties

Aliasing properties

Allows aliasing to other properties which can be useful to provide ‘magic’ behaviour, (only supported on StructuredNodes):

class Person(StructuredNode):
    full_name = StringProperty(index=True)
    name = AliasProperty(to='full_name')

Person.nodes.filter(name='Jim') # just works

Independent database property name

You can specify an independent property name with ‘db_property’, which is used at the database level. It behaves like Django’s ‘db_column’. This is useful when hiding graph properties behind a python property:

class Person(StructuredNode):
    name_ = StringProperty(db_property='name')

    @property
    def name(self):
        return self.name_.lower() if self.name_ else None

    @name.setter
    def name(self, value):
        self.name_ = value

Reserved properties

To prevent conflicts with neomodel / Neo4j internals, the following properties are reserved, and will throw a ValueError if you try to define them in elements.

  • Nodes :
    • deleted - used to mark an object for deletion by neomodel

  • Relationships :
    • source - id of the source node for a relationship

    • target - id of the target node

  • Both :
    • id - internal Neo4j id of elements in version 4 ; deprecated in 5

    • element_id - internal Neo4j id of elements in version 5

Notes

This section groups together special notes for specific data types.

StringProperty

  1. One needs to be extremely careful with very long strings that are also indexed.
    1. Neo4j imposes an internal hard limit of 4039 bytes to properties of type string. This is not the same as the length of a UTF-8 string in characters, because each character in a UTF-8 string might be represented by more than one bytes.

    2. Internally, Neo4j will truncate a string so that its byte length is not longer than 4039 but it will not raise an exception. Consequently, if a neomodel.StringProperty() happens to run much longer than this limit, it will be silently truncated. The rest of the string will be dropped and the next time the entity is read from the database it will appear to be incomplete.

    3. This can also lead to a UniqueException if two strings differ after the 4039 byte mark.

    4. For more information please see here.