Loading from JSON format

A JSON file is a file that stores simple data structures and objects in JavaScript Object Notation format, which is a standard data interchange format. The data you want to import to the database is often saved in JSON format, and you might want to import parts of that data as graph objects - nodes or relationships.

Below, you can find two examples of how to use the load JSON methods depending on the data source:

• Load JSON from a local file
• Load JSON from a remote address

The above methods are procedures of query module implemented in MAGE (Memgraph Advanced Graph Extensions) and you can read more about them in the MAGE documentation.

note

To be able to call JSON load procedures, you need to install MAGE and load query modules. To learn how to do that, check out the Run a query module how-to guide.

Examples

The following examples will show how to load data from a local JSON file or a remote address.

Load JSON from a local file

To import data from a local JSON file, use load_from_path(path) procedure that takes one string argument (path) and returns a list of JSON objects from the file located at the provided path.

Let's import data from a file data.json with the following content:

{
  "first_name": "Jessica",
  "last_name": "Rabbit",
  "pets": ["dog", "cat", "bird"]
}

If you are using Docker to run Memgraph, you will need to copy the files from your local directory into the Docker container where Memgraph can access them.

To create a node with the label Person and first_name, last_name and pets as properties, run the following query:

CALL json_util.load_from_path("path/to/data.json")
YIELD objects
UNWIND objects AS o
CREATE (:Person {first_name: o.first_name, last_name: o.last_name, pets: o.pets});

After you execute the above query, the graph in Memgraph should look like this:

Load JSON from a remote address

To import data from a remote JSON file, use load_from_url(url) procedure that takes one string argument (url) and returns a list of JSON objects from the file located at the provided URL.

For example, at "https://download.memgraph.com/asset/mage/data.json", you can find the following data.json file:

{
  "first_name": "James",
  "last_name": "Bond",
  "pets": ["dog", "cat", "fish"]
}

To create a node with the label Person and first_name, last_name and pets as properties from the data.json file. You can run the following query:

CALL json_util.load_from_url("https://download.memgraph.com/asset/mage/data.json")
YIELD objects
UNWIND objects AS o
CREATE (:Person {first_name: o.first_name, last_name: o.last_name, pets: o.pets});

After you run the above query, the graph in Memgraph should look like this:

note

To load JSON files from another local or remote location, just replace the argument of the procedure with the appropriate path or URL. If you want to create a different kind of graph, you need to change the query accordingly. To learn more about querying, check out the Cypher manual.