Storing object as property in Neo4j
You could do something like this with cypher and have the cypher return a composite object.
MATCH (t:Tile)-[:CONTAINS_USER]-(u:User)
WHERE t.name =~ 'Tile.*'
WITH {name: t.name, users: collect(u) } AS tile
RETURN collect(tile) AS tiles
You shouldn't store another object as a nested property. As you correctly state, neo4j doesn't support that but even if it did, you shouldn't do it, because you should link the two with a relationship. That's the key strength of a graph database like neo4j, so you should play to that strength and use the relationships.
The server has a default JSON format that tends to output nodes as their own JSON objects. That means that practically speaking, since you're going to model this as two separate nodes with a relationship, you can't get the server by default to nest the JSON for one object underneath of the other. It won't nest the JSON that way because that's not how the data will be stored.
In this case, I'd use the REST services to fetch the JSON for each object individually, and then do the nesting yourself in your code -- your code is the only place where you'll know which property it should be nested under, and how that should be done.
In addition to these answers, note that if you don't need to involve the subfield properties in any of your queries (e.g. search for Tiles where a User.name is "X"), you can simply serialise the objects fields to a string before insertion (e.g. with JSON.stringify
), and unserialise them when reading from the DB.
This is especially useful when you want to "attach" structured data to a node, but that you don't much care about this data with regards to the relations in your DB (e.g. User preferences).