Dynamic Tree Widget

Published by Rob on May 2nd, 2003 - in Java

I just went through the process of setting up a dynamic tree widget, and thought I should type up my experience with this. If for no other reason than keeping the information alive for myself in the future.

The tree is based off of the Tigra Tree widget. Their tree is a Java Script/DHTML one. It has a nice MVCish structure with the Model for the tree seperated quite cleanly from the view.

I made the following changes to the base product:

adding an ID,
passing in the path to the current selection (useful for returning to a page and viewing which one was selected — I pass in the path rather than deriving it to make it perform when there is 4000+ nodes in the tree).
open the tree to the current selection.
improvment of the lazy loading features.

Producing a nice performant tree — I would love for someone to pay me to write an open source tree some time (hint hint).

I just needed to cache the data on the client so that it didn’t have to get reloaded…. but that deserves it’s own entry .