Neo4j Cypher Query to Get User Feed

Question

Assume that my project is Facebook. I want to display a feed which consists of my status updates and my friends' status updates both.

Here are the relations;

• user KNOWS user
• user UPDATES_STATUS status

This is how I get my friends status updates;

START me = node(1) MATCH me-[:KNOWS]-()-[:UPDATES_STATUS]->friendsStatusUpdates RETURN friendsStatusUpdates

And this is how I get my own status updates;

START me = node(1) MATCH me-[:UPDATES_STATUS]->myStatusUpdates RETURN myStatusUpdates

Both queries work fine but I need a single query that combines these two.

Answer 1

Here is the answer I got from Google Groups;

START me = node(1) MATCH me-[:KNOWS*0..1]-()-[:UPDATES_STATUS]->statusUpdate RETURN DISTINCT statusUpdate

Only thing I had to do was adding *0..1 depth indicator to the relation in order to get both 0 or 1 level depth results.

Edit: I had to add DISTINCT because without it query includes 0 level nodes 2 times which results in duplicates.

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Alternative query which returns same results using WITH statement;

START me = node(1) 
MATCH me-[:KNOWS*0..1]-friend
WITH DISTINCT friend
MATCH friend-[:UPDATES_STATUS]->statusUpdate 
RETURN DISTINCT statusUpdate

Answer 2

Crate a himself relationship between user node to itself than query is START me = node(1) MATCH me-[:KNOWS|HIMSELF]-()-[:UPDATES_STATUS]->friendsStatusUpdates RETURN friendsStatusUpdates

Answer 3

http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/milestone/introduction-pattern.html

START me = node(1) 
MATCH me-[:UPDATES_STATUS*1..2|KNOWS]-myStatusUpdates 
RETURN myStatusUpdates

in case the *1..2 wont work with | command, do this:

START me = node(1) 
MATCH friendsStatusUpdates2-[?:UPDATES_STATUS]-me-[:KNOWS]-()-[:UPDATES_STATUS]->friendsStatusUpdates 
RETURN distinct myStatusUpdates,friendsStatusUpdates2

just edit the RETURN statement with some aggregation function so you will get one status per row