feat: Allow returning all of a query's results by alias, not just property

[aheev]

https://neo4j.com/docs/cypher-manual/current/clauses/return/#return-nodes

[prrao87]

@aheev what is the desired syntax for this? Could you maybe elaborate a bit more?

[aheev]

Like this:

MATCH (p:Person {name: 'Keanu Reeves'})
RETURN p

The above doesn't work, and returns a query planning error.

What would ideally happen (as it does in Kuzu/Ladybug/Neo4j) is that it returns the entire results as a "Node" or "Path" result object, which can be materialized into an appropriate shape.

[prrao87]

I think the right behaviour here is: "return all properties and their values and allow conversion to the required type (pyarrow table, pylist, etc.) upon materialization". The pylist case would return a list of dicts in Python (a list of structs in Rust).

[aheev]

@beinan @ChunxuTang what do you think of this? Should we support it?

[ChunxuTang]

I think it also involves different design options. I'll take an investigation in the following few days.

[ChunxuTang]

Hi @aheev, thanks for waiting.

After consideration, I think we could support it by an expansion in the logical plan. For example, for this query
MATCH (p: Person) RETURN p, the logical plan can be expanded to RETURN p -> RETURN p.id, p.name, p.age, p.email.

To support, we will need to update the plan_return_clause method in the logical_plan.rs (https://github.com/lance-format/lance-graph/blob/main/crates/lance-graph/src/logical_plan.rs#L504).

Do you want to take this task? Or I can implement it this weekend. Just let me know your thoughts.

[aheev]

Hi @aheev, thanks for waiting.

After consideration, I think we could support it by an expansion in the logical plan. For example, for this query
MATCH (p: Person) RETURN p, the logical plan can be expanded to RETURN p -> RETURN p.id, p.name, p.age, p.email.

To support, we will need to update the plan_return_clause method in the logical_plan.rs (https://github.com/lance-format/lance-graph/blob/main/crates/lance-graph/src/logical_plan.rs#L504).

Do you want to take this task? Or I can implement it this weekend. Just let me know your thoughts.

I can work on this

[prrao87]

Thank you! Looking forward to the next release!