Knowledge Base

Enabling Transaction Timeout Within Application

There is a dbms.transaction.timeout global setting on Neo4j that can be set in neo4j.conf file so if any query from any user exceeds the timeout threshold specified, that query is terminated.

But how do you achieve this from within an application? Neo4j Java Driver API provides the class TransactionConfig that has a method called Timeout(<time in seconds>) that would allow transaction timeout to be set within the application.

More information on the api can be found here: https://neo4j.com/docs/java-manual/current/session-api/simple/#_transaction_timeout

Below is an example of the same.

Here we are defining the TransactionConfig and using it for explicit transactions.

TransactionConfig config = TransactionConfig.builder()
    .withTimeout(Duration.ofSeconds(4))
    .withMetadata(metadata)
    .build();

Defining the TransactionConfig and setting the timeout to 4 seconds. Using the configuration in explicit transactions.

try (Transaction tx = session.beginTransaction(config)) {
  // ...
} finally {
  // ...
}

So if this transaction exceeds 4 seconds it will be terminated.

Similarly, one can implement TransactionConfig to work with autocommit transactions and transaction functions.