Recursive function in Silverlight

Question

I have the following function in my c# silverlight application to find the total sub nodes of a node in the tree

        //get total children
    private int getTotalChildren(int id) 
    {
        int total=0;
        for (int i = 0; i < persons.Count;i++ )
        {
            if (persons[i].Manager == id)
            {
                total += 1;
                total += getTotalChildren(persons[i].Id);
            }
        }
        return total;
    }

the line total += getTotalChildren(persons[i].id) is making the browser windows auto close when i run it (i am guessing thats silverlights way of crashing?) in the IDE I don't get any errors.

edit: I don't see how it could be infinite recursion since there is no person which has itself as manager. persons is a List built using this xml

<?xml version="1.0" ?> 
<Persons>
    <Person>
        <Id>1</Id>
        <Name>temp</Name>
        <Qlid>1234</Qlid>
        <Manager>0</Manager>
    </Person>
    <Person>
        <Id>2</Id>
        <Name>someone</Name>
        <Qlid>5678</Qlid>
        <Manager>1</Manager>
    </Person>
    <Person>
        <Id>3</Id>
        <Name>wefwef</Name>
        <Qlid>3333</Qlid>
        <Manager>1</Manager>
    </Person>
    <Person>
        <Id>4</Id>
        <Name>batman</Name>
        <Qlid>6723</Qlid>
        <Manager>3</Manager>
    </Person>
    <Person>
        <Id>5</Id>
        <Name>batman</Name>
        <Qlid>6723</Qlid>
        <Manager>3</Manager>
    </Person>
</Persons>

edit2: ok sorry guys, it was something really stupid . It was a circular loop I thought I had made a shortcut to the xml file on my desktop but instead accidentaly made a copy. person 1 had person 3 as its manager who had person 1 as manager in the file the program was reading while I was editing the copy

Answer 1

You aren't specifying the child nodes anywhere. You always look at persons, which isn't changing.

Answer 2

[Speculation] You may be crashing due to a stack overflow caused by infinite recursion. Does your contain a member whose manager is the id itself? This would cause your recursion to never end and lead to a stack overflow.

private int getTotalChildren(int id) 
{
    int total=0;
    for (int i = 0; i < persons.Count;i++ )
    {
        if (persons[i].Manager == id)
        {
            total += 1;
            if(persons[i].Manager != persons[i].Id)
            {
                total += getTotalChildren(persons[i].Id);
            }
        }
    }
    return total;
}

Answer 3

Internally, Silverlight has a "recursion limit" designed to help avoid code that freezes the user's browser. If you Google around for "Silverlight recursion" or similar you'll find a few links.

I don't know a ton about it, but my guess is that you'll simply need to do this a different way.

Answer 4

Protip: consider a for/while loop instead of incurring the frame memory overhead associated with recusion for simple scenarios like this.

Remember, everything you can accomplish with recusion can be accomplished without it. A seasoned developer knows when to sacrifice performance for readability.