Regards,
Peter Higgins

I do understand the perils of an open source project. And I’m a big fan of Dojo, but this stupid tree thing is literally my biggest gripe against it.

And not to rant too much, but one more obstacle to our mass adoption of the tree — one can’t use the XML datasource with it.

What’s up with that??

thanks for your post.

I understand your frustration with some of the functionality of the Tree.
The Dojo Toolkit is an effort by many people who work on it for the “love” of it. It is difficult sometimes to control what gets done first and then we get things like fancy widgets but not a well documented tree widget. This is not an excuse, but should give you some insight in why some things seem to take longer than others.

If you have issues I can only suggest that you file a ticket, or even a patch which adds the functionality you require, or ask in the #dojo channel on irc.freenode.net

The Toolkit is on a very good path, we are currently working hard on entire new documentation (the sandbox is here on docs.dojocampus.org) and hopefully can be released soon. Hopefully the issues you have with the Tree will be addressed by then as well.

Lazily loading data in a tree should be a straightforward task. It shouldn’t involve workarounds and hacks (e.g. including a bunk “children” array on the data). But what’s worst of all is that this functionality USED to be included in Dojo — I first used a lazy loading tree somewhere around the .4 Dojo version 2 years ago and it worked GREAT. That tree is still in a production system today; it even included an out-of-box little animated hourglass icon that would display while data was being dynamically loaded. The clients loved it.

Then somewhere after that .4 Dojo version the tree was dropped from core functionality. One had to hack the old one to use it on a newer Dojo, or use some beta version which was barely functional. Then that beta (I think it was called the V3 tree?) version was forgotten about… and there was nothing for awhile. Then a somewhat busted tree came along, and finally the one we have today.

We have chosen not to use Dojo for some new projects because of the sordid history of the tree widget (and used YUI’s instead, which is great). This is a widget that many modern systems require, and it should really be given more attention. Please stop making crazy video player and toaster widgets and focus on the important ones first.

Unfortunately, dijit.Tree has some built-in caching mechanisms that make “refreshing” nodes rather difficult. See comments here: http://dojocampus.org/content/2008/06/04/refreshing-a-data-store/