Neo-Viz

Neo-Viz is a tool for visualizing Neo data in the browser. It is a Sinatra application that uses Neo4j.rb to read data from a Neo database directory. It shows the data using Javascript in a browser.

Installing

The visualizer can be used stand-alone or embedded in a Rails application.

External Dependencies

The visualizer has an external dependency on coffee-script. It can be installed by:

# OS X
$ brew install coffee-script

# Linux
$ apt-get install coffee-script

Standalone

To use it standalone you must first get the code from the repository.

$ git clone [email protected]:AmanziTel/neo-viz.git
$ cd neo-viz

# To use it as is
$ rackup
[2011-06-23 07:48:34] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2011-06-23 07:48:34] INFO  ruby 1.8.7 (2011-05-23) [java]
[2011-06-23 07:48:34] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=64743 port=9292


# To install it as a gem
$ rake install
neo-viz 1.0.0 built to pkg/neo-viz-1.0.0.gem
neo-viz (1.0.0) installed

$ neo-viz
[2011-06-23 07:51:10] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2011-06-23 07:51:10] INFO  ruby 1.8.7 (2011-05-23) [java]
[2011-06-23 07:51:10] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=64864 port=1666

Embedding in Rails

To embed the visualizer in Rails, you first have to add it to your Gemfile.

# Gemfile
gem 'neo-viz', :git => '[email protected]:AmanziTel/neo-viz.git'

Then you have to mount the route in routes.rb

# config/routes.rb
mount Neo::Viz::App => '/neo-viz'

You can now access it at e.g. http://localhost:3000/neo-viz.

Neo4j Database

The standalone version expects a db directory containing the usual Neo4j database files.

The embedded version uses the Neo4j database that has been configured for the embedding project.

Known issues

There is a problem running the Jasmine specs (/run-specs) on Windows if the "therubyrhino" gem is installed and you are using JRuby. On Windows we want to use the built-in JScript runtime but ExecJS chooses Rhino if it is installed.

Typical errors returned over HTTP when requesting a .coffee file:

throw Error("NativeException: org.mozilla.javascript.JavaScriptException:
    Error: too many ) on line 2 (<eval>#8)\n  (in c:/..../neo-viz/public/coffeescripts/canvas_util.coffee)")

A workaround is to uninstall the therubyrhino gem, but ofcourse it will be re-installed on every call to bundle. I can't figure out how to tell bundler not to load a specific gem when I'm on JRuby and Windows.

To do

Server

• Make it possible to choose where that data comes from
• Implement a command line interface for starting the server and selecting the data source.

Client

• Group nodes, if there are too many to show.
• bind and trigger with custom events

License

MIT, see LICENSE file

Changes

• 2011-12-20 Release 1.0.2 and fix of warnings (public folder)
• 2011-09-28 Added relationship filter
• 2001-09-28 Enabled embedding from AJAX-call (/embedded)
• 2011-06-23 Changed the namespace.
• 2011-06-23 Added depth to the traversal algorithm
• 2011-06-20 A query protocol for selecting only the relevant nodes
• 2011-06-20 Query protocol editor to select the relevant nodes to ask
• 2011-06-16 Views for showing only the relevant properties.
• 2011-06-16 Node filter
• 2011-06-16 Select number of nodes to show.
• 2011-06-14 Click to show detailed information.
• Connect with the Server to get the data.
• Fetch new data from the Server when a node is selected.
• Limit the amount of nodes shown on the screen.
• Show the properties of the nodes and relations.