Dealing with complex hierarchies in RavenDB

For many business domains, it is common to need to deal with hierarchies or graphs. The organization chart is one such common scenario, as is the family tree. It is common to want to use graph queries to deal with such scenarios, but I find that it is usually much easier to explicitly build your own queries..

Consider the following query, which will give me the entire hierarchy for a particular employee:

I can define my own logic for traversing from the document to the related documents, and I can do whatever I want there. You can also see that I’m including the related documents, here is how this looks like when I execute the query:

A single query gives me all the details I need to show the user with one roundtrip to the server.

Let’s go with a more complex example. The above scenario had a single path to follow, which is trivial. What happens if I have a more complex system, such as a family tree? I took the Games of Thrones data (easiest to work with for this demo) and threw that into RavenDB, and then executed the following query:

And that gives me the following output:

This is a pretty fun technique to explore, because you can run any arbitrary logic you need, and expressing things in an imperative manner is typically much more straightforward.