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Arangoexport – a tool for exporting data from ArangoDB

With the release of the initial alpha of ArangoDB version 3.2 we also include the preview of the new export tool arangoexport. Alpha2 of ArangoDB 3.2 can be downloaded here. An export functionality was initially requested by one of our community members to view an ArangoDB graph view the Cytoscape visualizer.

Arangoexport is capable of exporting a graph or certain collections of a graph to xgmml, Cytoscape’s graph format. But arangoexport is not limited to this. It can also generate JSON or JSONL data exports of arbitrary collections.

For example, to export the collections collectionOne and collectionTwo to JSON just do:

arangoexport --type json --collection collectionOne --collection collectionTwo

If you would like to store the export data in a different directory just use the option:

--output-directory /my/path/to/export

The export type json will produce one big JSON array where every line is one document.

Export type jsonl will output line-wise JSON. So every line contains one document represented as standalone JSON.

JSONL files can be imported with arangoimp:

arangoimp --file "collectionOne.jsonl" --type jsonl --collection collectionOne

But the most anticipated feature is exporting a graph to xgmml. To do so just call arangoexport with type xgmml and a graph name:

arangoexport --type xgmml --graph-name myGraph

You can also specify an unnamed graph by additionally passing all collections that the graph consists of:

arangoexport --type xgmml --graph-name myGraph --collection vertexCollectionOne --collection vertexCollectionTwo --collection edgeCollectionOne

For xgmml there are two more options: one to suppress output of attributes to generate a smaller xgmml file, and the second is to select a different label attribute.

Also visit our documentation for arangoexport or open an issue if your super duper format is missing and should be added.

For questions please visit our Community Slack Channel.

Frank Celler

Frank Celler

Frank is both entrepreneur and backend developer, developing mostly memory databases for two decades. He is the CTO and co-founder of ArangoDB. Try to challenge Frank asking him questions on C, C++ and MRuby. Besides Frank organizes Cologne’s NoSQL group & is an active member of NoSQL community.

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