Best practices for composite objects

[ivan-015]

Hello all! I've been using neogma for the last couple of months on my project. One of the biggest painpoints I have is relating to composite objects. For instance, let's say I need to return to the client the following structure:

{
  song: {
    title: "Song name",
    //song attributes...
    albums: [
      {
        name: "album name"
        //album attributes...
        artists: [
          {
            name: "artist name"
            //artist attributes...
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

In this case, song, album, and artist are all separate nodes.

If I want to return an object like this, I would use the queryBuilder to get the nodes, and then create the DTO manually from the database information.

I've been using the querybuilder so far, since I need to use apoc and other neo4j features, but it seems kind of tedious/unmaintainable to query all this information in every service of my NestJS app when I want to return a song with this information. Are there any best practices to prevent this/ account for when the objects may change so that I don't have to go into every single service every time my app changes? Thanks!

[themetalfleece]

Hey Ivan! Thanks for your comment.
I'm afraid that there aren't any best practices for this. I personally create functions that run queryBuilder operations inside them, like const getSongsDto = (..., which transform the object as needed. I then reuse them in my services.

Something that would improve it is eager loading relationships which is still not ready.

[ivan-015]

Thanks for the reply @themetalfleece , good to know since that's what I have been doing, but wanted to be sure that's the preferred approach in the meantime. Looking forward to eager loading!