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I have a local SQLite database that contains a tree (as Nested Sets). In an AIR application, I want to display that tree in a tree control and provide means to change the nodes' names and copy, move, add or delete nodes.

Now, I'm hiccupping a little on where to put which code. Obviously, I have a class which will perform operations like load / update / insert / delete against the database. This would load the whole tree into some storage variable and save changes made by the user back to the db.

Should this class be the dataProvider, the dataDescriptor or an extension of the Tree control itself? And when the user requests an operation like adding a node, should that update the dataProvider and let the database handler react on an event, or should it call the database handler's method and then update the dataProvider? I'd say that the latter is better, because it's easier to not update the Tree's data if something goes wrong with the db query.

There's methods to add and remove nodes in the DefaultDataDescriptor and in the Tree class (protected methods in the latter), should I use / extend those or ignore them?

The reason I'm confused about this is that, according to the docs, a Tree control uses the object stored in its 'dataDescriptor' property to parse and manipulate the actual data which is stored inside its 'dataProvider' property.

This seems to make sense, until you realize that unless you subclass it, it's never the Tree control that manipulates data (with the exception of drag&drop, if that's enabled), and it's not the dataDescriptor, either. Rather, in all examples, manipulating data happens directly via the dataProvider object and that triggers event handlers in the Tree control.

What is it I don't get here?

+1  A: 

Take a look at mx.controls.treeClasses.HierarchicalCollectionView. It is not part of the public API, but its full source is available as part of Flex. The Tree controller uses this class internally to handle various data sources.

David Hanak
A: 

were you able to write code for this? I have similar requirement and have no idea on how to do this?

A: 

I'm having a similar problem. The user can manipulate the Tree control twelve ways to Sunday, but I'm really having difficulty figuring out how to read that structure back into an XML data structure for update/storage. I'll open another thread and see if I can get an answer.