Neo4j -Failed to add Bidirectional ralationship

Question

I am a newbie to neo4j, I started building relationships between the nodes. Uni directional relationships are created properly without throwing any error but the bi-directional relationship is throwing the syntax error. Here goes my query:

MATCH(a{word:"nothing"}),(b{word:"review"})
CREATE a-[r:coocr{val:1}]-(b)
RETURN r,s

Then ended up with this:

MATCH(a{word:"nothing"}),(b{word:"review"})
CREATE a-[r:coocr{val:1}]->(b)
CREATE a<-[s:coocr{val:1}]-(b)
RETURN r,s

How can I reduce the no.of relationships using bidirectional relationships.

Answer 1

Neo4j doesn't support creating bidirectional relationships, but you can query from either direction without any difference in performance.

If you want to represent different values/states going to/from then you'll want to create a relationship going in each direction. Otherwise you should just creating it in whatever direction makes most senses (or arbitrarily in some cases) and query bidirectionally like this:

MATCH (a{word:"nothing"})-[rel:coocr]-(b{word:"review"})
RETURN rel

Note that there's no greater than or less than to represent the end of the arrow.