How to allow users to select their own grouping for a .NET TreeView control

Question

I am using a treeview to display projects, tasks, time entries, and the people who are working on a project. I would like to allow the user to define a custom grouping (ie. Project->Task->Time Entries or Project->Date (of time entry)->Task->TimeEntry).

The relevant groups would be Project, Task, Time Entry, and Person, with some metadata from them. I want to have some modular way to allow a user to specify how they would like to display the information.

Does anyone know of a good method by which this can be done? I currently have hard-coded a display which looks like this:

Project  
  Task
    Time Entry
Next Project
...

My thought is to do something like write methods to display each type and somehow let a user select what order the display would group.

Please let me know if I am not being clear enough.

Answer 1

Here is one way:

Make a function to load a treeview node. Pass as a parameter the group types in hierarchical order: Project, Task, Time Entry, for example. The parameter could be an array or other type.

In the function, load the nodes with the items on the top of the hierarchy: Project first, in this example. For each project you add to the nodes collection, call the function recursively with all but the top item as the parameter -- Task and Time Entry in this example, then time entry only at the third level of recursion.