Chapter 5. Spring Data Graph

Conjuring magic

So far it had all been pure Spring Framework and Neo4j. However, using the Neo4j code in our domain classes polluted them with graph database details. For this application, we wanted to keep the domain classes clean. Spring Data Graph promised to do the heavy lifting for us, so we continued investigating it.

Spring Data Graph depends heavily on AspectJ Chapter 24, AspectJ details. Some parts of our classes would get new behavior, but it would not be visible in our code. The upside of this is that you get rid of a lot of boilerplate code.

The first step was to configure Maven:

Example 5.1. Spring Data Graph Maven configuration

<properties>
    <aspectj.version>1.6.12.M1</aspectj.version>
</properties>

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.data</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-data-neo4j</artifactId>
  <version>1.1.0</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.aspectj</groupId>
    <artifactId>aspectjrt</artifactId>
    <version>${aspectj.version}</version>
</dependency>

<build> <plugins> <plugin>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
    <artifactId>aspectj-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>1.2</version>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.aspectj</groupId>
            <artifactId>aspectjrt</artifactId>
            <version>${aspectj.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.aspectj</groupId>
            <artifactId>aspectjtools</artifactId>
            <version>${aspectj.version}</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <goals>
                <goal>compile</goal>
                <goal>test-compile</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
    <configuration>
        <outxml>true</outxml>
        <aspectLibraries>
            <aspectLibrary>
                <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-aspects</artifactId>
            </aspectLibrary>
            <aspectLibrary>
                <groupId>org.springframework.data</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-data-neo4j</artifactId>
            </aspectLibrary>
        </aspectLibraries>
        <source>1.6</source>
        <target>1.6</target>
    </configuration>
</plugin> </plugins> </build>

The Spring context configuration was much easier, thanks to a provided namespace:

Example 5.2. Spring Data Graph context configuration

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" ...
       xmlns:datagraph="http://www.springframework.org/schema/data/graph"
       xsi:schemaLocation="... http://www.springframework.org/schema/data/graph
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/data/graph/datagraph-1.0.xsd">
    ...
    <datagraph:config storeDirectory="data/graph.db"/>
    ...
</beans>

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