Neo4j cypher - Counting immediate children of root nodes

Question

I'm struggling with a problem despite having read a lot of documentation... I'm trying to find my graph root node (or nodes, they may be several top nodes) and counting their immediate children (all relations are typed :BELONGS_TO)

My graph looks like this (cf. attached screenshot). I have been trying the following query which works as long as the root node only has ONE incomming relationship, and it doesn not when it has more than one. (i'm not realy familiar with the cyhper language yet).

MATCH (n:Somelabel) WHERE NOT (()-[:BELONGS_TO]->(n:Somelabel)) RETURN n

Any help would be much appreciated ! (i haven't even tried to count the root nodes immediate children yet...which would be "2" according to my graph)

Correct query was given by cybersam

MATCH (n:Somelabel) WHERE NOT (n)-[:BELONGS_TO]->() RETURN n;

MATCH (n:Somelabel)<-[:BELONGS_TO]-(c:Somelabel)
WHERE NOT (n)-[:BELONGS_TO]->() RETURN n, count(c);

Answer 1

Based on your diagram, it looks like you are actually looking for "leaf" nodes. This query will search for all Somelabel nodes that have no outgoing relationships, and return each such node along with a count of the number of distinct nodes that have a relationship pointing to that node.

MATCH (n:Somelabel)
WHERE NOT (n)-[:BELONGS_TO]->()
OPTIONAL MATCH (m)-[:BELONGS_TO]->(n)
RETURN n, COUNT(DISTINCT m);

If you are actually looking for all "root" nodes, your original query would have worked.

As a sanity check, if you have a specific node that you believe is a "leaf" node (let's say it has an id value of 123), this query should return a single row with null values for r and m. If you get non-null results, then you actually have outgoing relationships.

MATCH (n {id:123})
OPTIONAL MATCH (n)-[r]->(m)
RETURN r, m