Recursive TreeView in ASP.NET

Question

I have an object of type list from which I wish to use to populate a treeview in asp.net c#.

Each object item has:

id | Name | ParentId

so for example:

id | Name     | ParentId
-------------------------
1  | Alice    | 0
2  | Bob      | 1
3  | Charlie  | 1
4  | David    | 2

In the above example, the parent would be Alice having two children Bob and Charlie. David is the child of Bob.

I have had many problems trying to dynamically populate the treeview recursively in c# ASP.NET

Does any one have a simple solution?

Btw: you can use People.Id, People.Name and People.ParentId to access the members since it is an object belonging to list.

I can post you my code so far (many attempts made) but not sure how useful it will be.

Answer 1

You need to sort the data by the ParentId (as currently is). Add each node to the tree using the Id as the key. Then you can just run through the data adding nodes, you do not need recursion. You will need to get each parent node by it's key using the ParentId and add your next node to that parent.

There are more efficient ways of doing this, but lets start with the basics.

Answer 2

I think this should get you started. I created a MyObject class to mimic your object .

public class MyObject
{
    public int Id;
    public int ParentId;
    public string Name;
}

Here is a method to recursivley add tree view nodes based on the list.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    if (!IsPostBack)
    {
        List<MyObject> list = new List<MyObject>();
        list.Add(new MyObject(){Id=1, Name="Alice", ParentId=0});
        list.Add(new MyObject(){Id=2, Name="Bob", ParentId=1});
        list.Add(new MyObject(){Id=3, Name="Charlie", ParentId=1});
        list.Add(new MyObject(){Id=4, Name="David", ParentId=2});            

        BindTree(list, null);            
    }
}

private void BindTree(IEnumerable<MyObject> list, TreeNode parentNode)
{
    var nodes = list.Where(x => parentNode == null ? x.ParentId == 0 : x.ParentId == int.Parse(parentNode.Value));
    foreach (var node in nodes)
    {
        TreeNode newNode = new TreeNode(node.Name, node.Id.ToString());
        if (parentNode == null)
        {
            treeView1.Nodes.Add(newNode);
        }
        else
        {
            parentNode.ChildNodes.Add(newNode);
        }
        BindTree(list, newNode);
    }
}