Cypher Filter by Date .... WHERE x.birth_date > "10/06/1947"

[Rich Westington]

How would I be able to filter all people in a graph who were born before 10/06/1947 ?
Right now I'm storing birthdays as a String property called birth_date with format MM/DD/YYYY

    START n=node(2) MATCH (n)<-[:IS_A]-(x) WHERE x.birth_date > "10/06/1947" RETURN x.name,x.birth_date ORDER BY x.birth_date DESC

Is there any known ways of filtering by date without using UNIX Timestamps because I have many dates before 1970.

[Andres Taylor]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 1:54 AM, Rich Westington <richwes...@gmail.com> wrote:

How would I be able to filter all people in a graph who were born before 10/06/1947 ?
Right now I'm storing birthdays as a String property called birth_date with format MM/DD/YYYY

    START n=node(2) MATCH (n)<-[:IS_A]-(x) WHERE x.birth_date > "10/06/1947" RETURN x.name,x.birth_date ORDER BY x.birth_date DESC

Neo4j doesn't support dates very well today. We have plans to work on it, but I don't know when that might happen.

Does anyone have a good work-around for this that they can share?

Andrés

[Newbie]

Anyone has more update on this? In my case, dates are very important.

On Dec 30 2011, 4:16 am, Andres Taylor <and...@neotechnology.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 1:54 AM, Rich Westington

> <richwesting...@gmail.com>wrote:

[Nigel Small]

I have always found storing dates in ISO format "YYYY-MM-DD" allows textual sorting to become infinitely easier. There are also many libraries which can support this format so it's very easy to work with.

Nige

 

Nigel Small

Phone: +44 7814 638 246

Blog: http://nigelsmall.name/

GTalk: ni...@nigelsmall.name

MSN: nas...@live.co.uk

Skype: technige

Twitter: @technige

LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/nigelsmall

[Peter Neubauer]

Well,
I have been storing dates as longs on the nodes and then converted them from and to formatted strings outside the Cypher query. Would that work in your case?

/peter

Sent from my phone, please excuse typos and autocorrection.

[xia.in...@gmail.com]

That's a good suggestion! 

A question is how would you query something like "give me something prior to this date".

Thanks,

[xia.in...@gmail.com]

How do you handle for dates that are prior to the epoc time? As long as I could do a query using something as in Rich's original post, i.e. using x.birth_date > a_number_equivalent_to_a_date, I think I can live with that for now. 

Thanks

[Rich Westington]

Do you mean to do something like this?

if date is 2012-01-11 19:26:02

    long birth_date = 20120111192602

then in cypher ... to get all dates before today

    WHERE x.birth_date < 20120111000000

I never thought about doing it like that...

[Nigel Small]

Yes, you can either use a numeric (20120111) or textual ("2012-01-11") version. Given that the ISO date format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601) describes the latter, that's generally my preference unless I'm specifically limited to numeric values.

You can then of course compare, so:

x <= "2011-12-31"

would give you everything on or before the end of 2011, for example.

This isn't Cypher/Neo specific of course - I've used it on many DB platforms.

Nige

 

Nigel Small

Phone: +44 7814 638 246

Blog: http://nigelsmall.name/

GTalk: ni...@nigelsmall.name

MSN: nas...@live.co.uk

Skype: technige

Twitter: @technige

LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/nigelsmall

[Rich Westington]

Do you know if using a long would be faster than strings when using ORDER BY in neo4j or are they about the same?

[Tero Paananen]

I just ran into this issue.

I'm using SDN with NodeEntity objects that have properties of type
java.util.Date.

Those fields get saved in Neo4J as strings.

So now I have Repository methods that look like this:

@Query(value = "start user = node({nodeId}) match (user)<-
[cn:CONNECTED]-(c) where cn.contactDate > {since} return c", type =
QueryType.Cypher)
Page<User> getConnectedSince(@Param("nodeId") Long nodeId,
@Param("since") String since, Pageable pageable);

And I call it with something like:

Iterable<User> connections = getConnectedSince(1l, String.valueOf(new
Date().getTime()), pageable);


While that's working fine, it just seems really, really dumb given
that Date is natively representated as a long, and numeric comparisons
should be much more effective than string comparisons.

Migrating Dates from string to long representation in SDN would break
all existing implementations, however (unless they could be converted
"on-the-fly" somehow).

Michael, what do you think?

-TPP

[James Thornton]

See...

"What every programmer should know about time" (http://unix4lyfe.org/time/)

Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2725015

- James

[Tero Paananen]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 3:50 PM, James Thornton
<james.t...@gmail.com> wrote:
> See...
>
> "What every programmer should know about time" (http://unix4lyfe.org/time/)

Quoteth:

"When storing time, store Unix time. It's a single number. "

-TPP

[Michael Hunger]

Tero,

can you please raise an issue about this.

Thanks a lot

Michael

[Luanne Coutinho]

I just store it as a long, convert my target date as well to a long and compare those- I believe dates before the epoch should still work because the long just turns to negative prior to that. Will double check though now that it's been brought up.