2023.0.0

Welcome to 2023, welcome Java 17, welcome Neo4j 5 clauses. This is the first release of the Cypher-DSL requiring Java 17. This is in line with Neo4j itself, Spring Data Neo4j 7 and several other frameworks out there. This allows for more concise code (which is nice for us) as well as using the Neo4j 5 parser in neo4j-cypher-dsl-parser module. Bumping the JDK warrants a major upgrade already.

Apart from that we have been very reluctant on breaking changes. As a matter of fact, close to none has been necessary. One of the few improvements that might need changes on your side is #551 (Commit 10080df) in which we improved the WITH clause: You might see ambiguous method errors and the fix can be seen here for example: Either use JDK 17 reserved name var for local variable type-inference or use explicit IdentifiableElement.

There's a lot of new stuff as well: You can now use Expressions.count to build new Neo4j 5 COUNT expressions and we do support the USE clause for composite database queries as well.

Please fear not if you are still on JDK 8: We will maintain the 2022.8.x branch at least as long as Spring Data Neo4j 6.3 is maintained, as the latter is build on top of the Cypher-DSL and is JDK 8, too.

Thanks a lot to our friend @ikwattro from @graphaware for his continuous and well appreciated feedback and input to this project.

🚀 Features

• Add support for the COUNT {} sub-query expressions. (#546)
• Pretty print USE clause proper. (#543, thanks to @ikwattro for contributing this)
• Add support for the USE clause in the DSL. (#542)

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Allow match after unwind as defined by OpenCypher. (#531)

🔄️ Refactorings

• Improve returning and with. (#551)
• Allow yield * for standalone calls with arguments, too. (#545, thanks to @zakjan taking the time and report this)
• Upgrade the parser module to use the new Neo4j 5 parser. (#503)
• Migrate the project to Java 17. (#518)
• Prevent usage of REMOVE item inside SET clause (during RT). (#506)

📖 Documentation

• Update changelog.
• Add section about dialect support.
• Make clear that pretty printing does not always escape names.
• Document correct Java version in README.adoc.

🧰 Tasks

• Extend license header to 2023.

🧹 Housekeeping

• Dependency upgrades:
  • Bump assertj-core from 3.23.1 to 3.24.1 (#549)
  • Bump checker-qual from 3.28.0 to 3.29.0 (#548)
  • Bump neo4j-java-driver from 5.3.0 to 5.3.1 (#535)
  • Bump spring-boot-starter-parent from 3.0.0 to 3.0.1 (#534)
  • Bump checkstyle from 10.5.0 to 10.6.0 (#537)
  • Bump mockito.version from 4.10.0 to 4.11.0 (#536)
  • Bump neo4j-cypher-javacc-parser from 5.2.0 to 5.3.0 (#529)
  • Bump annotations from 23.0.0 to 23.1.0 (#521)
  • Bump compile-testing from 0.20 to 0.21.0 (#526)
  • Bump reactor-bom from 2022.0.0 to 2022.0.1 (#527)
  • Bump mockito.version from 4.9.0 to 4.10.0 (#528)
  • Bump spring-boot-starter-parent from 2.7.5 to 3.0.0 (#509)
  • Bump neo4j-java-driver from 4.4.9 to 5.3.0 (#508)
  • Bump checker-qual from 3.27.0 to 3.28.0 (#517)
  • Bump compile-testing from 0.19 to 0.20 (#516)
  • Bump native-maven-plugin from 0.9.18 to 0.9.19 (#515)
  • Bump joda-time from 2.12.1 to 2.12.2 (#514)
  • Bump jackson-bom from 2.14.0 to 2.14.1 (#513)
  • Bump archunit from 1.0.0 to 1.0.1 (#512)
  • Bump native-maven-plugin from 0.9.17 to 0.9.18 (#511)
  • Bump checkstyle from 10.4 to 10.5.0 (#510)

🛠 Build

• Add more tests for GH-547.
• Define JaCoCo config in plugin-management. (#541)
• Add license-maven-plugin for checking Apache 2 compatible license and header formatting.
• Fix quality gate.
• Verify examples on Java LTS and next version.
• Fix docs build.
• Upgrade various actions to non-deprecated versions. (#519)