I am also building a Tree, and can only sort the top level nodes. I have not found an elegant solution to sorting the deeper child nodes, which leads me to believe I am going to have to walk the tree sorting as I go, or perhaps sort when a user opens a branch of the tree.
I am perfectly willing to walk the tree, I am just wondering if there is something I am missing. I see that the Sort class has a sort method that takes an array, is there anything like that, that will take an XMLList? Seems silly to convert all branches to XMLListCollections just to sort them (yes, I tried that on "itemopening", and it crashed firefox randomly) or perhaps I have to convert my dataprovider to an ArrayCollection.. which seems like a wrong turn too.. any help, hints, or even smart remarks are welcome at this point. Thanks, Terry --- In flexcoders@yahoogroups.com, "durnelln" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi all, > > I am trying to dynamically build and display a sorted tree, i.e. > create branches/leaves purely in actionscript. I *thought* that > using XML would make this easy due to its hierarchical nature and > Flex's e4x extensions (which should allow me to easily locate nodes > in the tree etc without having to code a load of recursion). An > example of the kind of structure I am trying to build looks something > like this: > > <group id="1" name="group 1" parent="" displayOrder="1"> > <group id="1_1" name="group 1_1" parent="1" displayOrder="1"> > <group id="1_1_1" name="group 1_1_1" parent="1_1" > displayOrder="1" /> > </group> > <group id="1_2" name="group 1_2" parent="1" displayOrder="2" /> > </group> > <group id="2" name="group 2" parent="" displayOrder="2" /> > <group id="3" name="group 3" parent="" displayOrder="3"> > <group id="3_1" name="group 3_1" parent="3" displayOrder="1" /> > </group> > > I am using an XMLListCollection as my tree data provider as this > provides the sorting capabilities I need to retain the sort order as > I add new nodes. As new group objects come in the plan is to turn > them into XML and add them to the tree in the appropriate location > (based on their parent attribute). The groups may come in in any > order so I make use of the sort ability of the XMLListCollection. > > After going round in circles for a couple of days trying to get it to > work, I found the following article on Peter Ent's blog: > > http://weblogs.macromedia.com/pent/archives/2006/10/tree_control_da.cf > m > > This has proven invaluable (thanks Peter!). However I am still > having problems. In Peter's example he adds top-level nodes via the > XMLListCollection's addItem method but child nodes via the > appendChild method of the underlying XML/XMLList object. Now, while > this allows me to build a tree, the child nodes added directly to the > XML are not sorted according to the XMLListCollection's sort order - > only the top-level nodes are sorted. > > Does anyone know how I can build this tree whilst maintaining the > sort order? I do not want to hard-code any particular sort function > as I want the sort field and direction etc. to remain configurable. > > Alternatively, is there any way to add child nodes directly through > the XMLListCollection object? It surprises me that a collection > designed for hierarchical XML data doesn't seem to support this (or > e4x for that matter). Why should it be necessary to access the > underlying XML data directly to add child nodes (causing the sort > order to break)? > > Somebody please help - this is driving me nuts! > > Nick. >
