Details
-
Improvement
-
Status: Closed
-
Minor
-
Resolution: Fixed
-
Adobe Flex SDK 3.0 (Release)
-
None
-
None
-
Language Found: English
Description
The IHierarchicalData interface used by the ADG provides more flexibility than the data descriptors used by mx.controls.Tree. I'd like to be able to use it with my open source TreeMap component, but I don't want to require users to have a license for the Data Viz components. Since this one interface isn't necessarily a major selling point of the Data Viz components, I think it wouldn't be too much trouble to move it into the main framework. Additionally, I think it would make sense to allow Tree to use it as well, since it is nearly the same as ITreeDataDescriptor, but with useful additions that make development easier.
In particular, I like the possibilities provided by the getRoot() function in IHierarchicalData. It allows me to pass in any flat list of data to IHierarchicalData and convert it to a hierarchical structure on the fly. For example, say you have a simple list of contacts in an IM application. You could organize them into a tree by groups, by online/offline status, or in a multitude of different ways by simply changing the IHierarchicalData wrapper. If I pass a flat list of data to a Tree, it will never get passed to the data descriptor. The Tree needs to see the root of the data as a branch before it will start using the data descriptor. Maybe this will work better as an enhancement request for ITreeDataDescriptor, but I think it would make a lot of sense for Tree and ADG to use the same sort of hierarchical data system.
Sreenivas Ramaswamy shows some other use-cases for better collections in Tree on his blog here:
http://flexpearls.blogspot.com/2008/01/using-advanceddatagrid-as-tree-control.html
I actually found it because I was looking to sort tree items like that, and while I will be using ADG like in his example, I think these use-cases are common enough to be part of the framework rather than an add-on.