Sortable tree/treeTable

[Kamran Kashanian <ka...@gmail.com>]

The Trinidad table provides default sorting support when a Java Array or
List is used for the Table data. This is done by wrapping the Array or List
with a SortableModel. SortableModel sorts the collection in it's
implementation of the setSortCriteria() method.

The Trinidad Tree and TreeTable also accept List-of-Lists or
Arrays-of-Arrays which are then wrapped by a ChildPropertyTreeModel. The
implementation of the ChildPropertyTreeModel also uses the SortableModel to
wrap the parent and child collections.

So theoretically, it should be possible to support default sorting in
tree/treeTable when a List-of-List or Array-of-Array is used for Tree data.

I would like to provide a patch to do this. Specifically, I would like to
propose the following:

1) Modify the Trinidad UIXTree to call setSortCriteria() on the TreeModel in
it's broadcast() method when a Sort event is being broadcast. This is
similar to UIXTable. This will enable the renderer to queue a sort event and
have the model get notified prior to broadcasting the event.
  1a) The renderer can set "row currency" to either a null or a non-null
rowKey prior to queueing the event so that the model knows either that the
entire tree is getting sorted (null rowKey) or the children of a particular
node are getting sorted (non-null rowKey).

2) Modify ChildPropertyTreeModel so that it sorts the root collection or
child collections based on the "row currency" defined in 1a.

I can provide more detail on the proposed use-case (lazy recursive sorting
of the ChildPropertyTreeModel, and sorting of child nodes using different
sort criteria, etc) in a separate email.

With this email, I would like to start a discussion and know if there is any
interest in doing this.


Thanks
Kamran