Getting Node object from Edge

When I am working with an Edge, there is a scenario where I want to find which Node is it, and I only have Memgraph node ID, and not the whole object. And I would want further to make a query with those Nodes I got from Edge property, but I can’t as I can’t make a query towards database with Memgraph ID of Node.

In other words, it would be good to return Node instead of Node-id in Memgraph when calling edge.start_node or edge.end_node

[jbajic]

So the reason for this kind of implementation is twofold. Since the memgraph as per bolt specification returns not nodes but nodes id when fetching edge the only way to tackle this issue is from the client-side. Not there can be two solutions:

1. One would be to implicitly change every user’s query to fetch nodes as well and to bind the nodes to edges, which would make another layer of query parsing from the client’s side that would be very complicated (you would need to return all the nodes that could be found in edges). Or make it easier but slower for, for every fetched edge performer another query that would get nodes (if that didn’t already happen) => This solution is needlessly complex

2. Another solution would be to keep the graph structure constantly in memory, in other words whenever a user would fetch nodes, we keep them in memory and map them if possible to edges (that’s how neo4j does it). The issue is an obvious inconsistency, sometimes you get id and sometimes you get node…

And that’s the reason this implementation has not changed much from current, I think what you are looking for is great but that would be a feature for a higher level querying (OGM)

[antoniofilipovic]

Okay, I really didn’t have an idea how such a feature could complicate things easily a lot. It makes sense for the user to handle nodes in a query then due to the reasons you provided. Thanks for such a detailed answer.