Cypher Neo4J - CASE Expression with MERGE

Fixed the issue as below

WITH u, b2,b1, g, r1, CASE  WHEN (b1.fork='y' and b2.fork='success') or (b1.fork='n') or   (b1.fork='success') THEN ['ok'] ELSE [] END as array1
FOREACH (el1 in array1 | MERGE (u)-[r2:STAGE {startdate:20141225, enddate:99999999, status:'InProgress'}]->(b2))

i.e. used CASE WHEN to create a dummy array that in a way has dummy elements matching the count of matches and then use FOREACH to iterate through the result.

Again, thanks Stefan for the idea...

Deepesh

To do conditional write operations you need to use the FOREACH trick. Using CASE you either return a one element array or a empty one. FOREACH iterates over the CASE expression and therefore conditionally executes the action. If you want an ELSE part as well you need to have a another FOREACH using the inverse condition in the CASE. As an example, instead of

WHEN 'y' THEN
   MERGE (u)-[r2:STAGE {startdate:20141225, enddate:'99999999', status:'InProgress'}]->(b2     {fork:'fail'}) RETURN 1
ELSE 
    MERGE (u)-[r2:STAGE {startdate:20141225, enddate:'99999999', status:'InProgress'}]->(b2)   RETURN 2
END

use

FOREACH(ignoreMe IN CASE WHEN 'y' THEN [1] ELSE [] END | 
    MERGE (u)-[r2:STAGE {startdate:20141225, enddate:'99999999', status:'InProgress'}]->(b2 {fork:'fail'})
)
FOREACH(ignoreMe IN CASE WHEN NOT 'y' THEN [1] ELSE [] END | 
    MERGE (u)-[r2:STAGE {startdate:20141225, enddate:'99999999', status:'InProgress'}]->(b2)
)

See also Mark's blog post on this.