[TINKERPOP-479] Consider Providing "getOrCreate" Functionality

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Won't Do
• Affects Version/s: 3.0.2-incubating
• Component/s: structure
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Stephen Mallette
• Created: 14/Jan/15 20:49
• Updated: 11/May/18 12:18
• Resolved: 11/May/18 12:18

Description

One of the most commonly written functions used is good ol' "getOrCreate" where you want to get a Vertex if it exists or create it with supplied properties if it does not. We currently have a "helper" function for this on ElementHelper

https://github.com/tinkerpop/tinkerpop3/blob/6d0f00865f673cb0739f6f310e1868425f732924/gremlin-core/src/main/java/com/tinkerpop/gremlin/structure/util/ElementHelper.java#L62

but perhaps it is time to treat this issue as a first class citizen as part of the Graph API. I think that some vendors might actually be able to optimize this function as well.

Another aspect of "getOrCreate" is "upsert" as well as options to ensure uniqueness. All of these things we've at some point or another built variations of outside of TinkerPop for applications, data loading, etc.