Determine security in an ACL using Neo4j and Gremlin

Question

I'm researching Neo4j to compare it's performance for implementing an access control list. It seems like this is a great fit.

Here's an article from a few years ago describing this exact use case. http://blog.neo4j.org/2010/02/access-control-lists-graph-database-way.html .

The has_access method though is written in ruby. I would think that using gremlin to process the query on the server would be more efficient for large graphs. How would I determine if a user has access to a node using Gremlin?

Thanks!

Answer 1

It turns out that for this problem, access to a folder can be determined by parsing the shortest paths between the user and the user and the folder.

Here is a cypher query that returns the shortest paths between two nodes, where the user is at node 157 and the folder is at node 160.

START u=node(157),f=node(160) 
MATCH p=allShortestPaths(u-[*]->f) 
RETURN p