Add option on apoc.path.expandConfig() to only return "maximal" paths

[neo-technology-build-agent]

Issue by dam-mond Thursday Nov 18, 2021 at 11:11 GMT Originally opened as https://github.com/neo4j-contrib/neo4j-apoc-procedures/issues/2339

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Raising this feature request on behalf of a customer.

Feature description

Customer use case: Currently customer is able to use the apoc.path.expand() procedure to get all the paths from an input list of nodes. At this point they're post-processing and manually extracting only "maximal" paths (paths that contain both the nodes and relationships of other paths and those that end at the same node).

They would like to have an option built-in directly into the APOC procedure to set this requirement, to only get these "maximal" paths.

This is also related to a Community request: https://community.neo4j.com/t/return-all-nodes-reachable-from-a-list-of-nodes-and-their-maximal-paths/47197

Considered alternatives

This can already be achieved by performing some manual Cypher post-processing of the apoc.path.expand() result but users may not be able to optimise this post-processing phase for best performance.