Flex Quick Starts: Working With Tree Controls

Since my original post on the subject, there is an additional tutorial for building an advanced user interface with Flex in the Flex Quick Starts area of the Adobe Flex Development Center.

• Working with Tree controls: Regarding the choice of data provider for a Tree control, if you have well formed XML and plan on manipulating the data as XML, you should use an XMLListCollection object as the data provider; if you have object data that changes dynamically, you should use an ArrayCollection object as the data provider. In either case, you should always use collection objects (XMLListCollection instead of XMLList and ArrayCollection instead of Array). Examples are provided in this tutorial to explain how to a) add / remove leaf nodes and branch nodes at run time, b) open the tree to a specific node, c) read an XML document with multiple node names, d) keep a Tree control expanded when its data provider is updated with new data, and e) dragging and dropping to and from a Tree control.