Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress Dynamics Basic Development

Introduction

The standard Progress Dynamics dynamic window gives you many options for the appearance of your application windows. As discussed in previous chapters, you can combine viewers, browsers, toolbars, folders, and other objects in a variety of layouts to provide many different looks to different parts of your application.

The Progress Dynamics TreeView gives you another option. You can build a dynamic window with a TreeView control to the left, which can represent a hierarchy of related data, a nested menu structure, or some other multi-level data with which you populate the TreeView. To the right, you can relate application pages and subwindows to different levels in the TreeView, to show details, or allow updates of any record at any level.

The TreeView window described in this chapter is referred to as a dynamic TreeView, because it is a largely data-driven object that is controlled by a single physical procedure file (rydyntreew.w). This file is a variation of the rydyncontw.w procedure file. The rydyncontw.w file generates all the varieties of dynamic windows discussed in earlier chapters that describe the Container Builder and the kinds of objects with which you can populate it. Two property sheets allow you to define what to display at each node level in the tree, as well as the overall structure of the TreeView itself.

The dynamic TreeView window uses the underlying Progress Dynamics object called the TreeView object. The TreeView object is a 4GL procedure that wraps a TreeView ActiveX Control. It provides a standard interface from other objects to the methods in the TreeView control that populate and manipulate the nodes of the TreeView.

Note: Progress Dynamics uses the standard Microsoft TreeView control.

You do not need to understand this object in detail to build dynamic TreeView windows. Generally speaking, you must learn more about the TreeView object if you want to use the TreeView to build a kind of window that the dynamic TreeView window does not provide for you. This might include:

Achieving a fundamentally different look and arrangement of objects on the screen.
Using the TreeView to coordinate data from objects the dynamic TreeView window does not handle yet, such as OpenEdge® B2B objects for communication to other applications using JMS™.
Assembling a larger compound object from the TreeView object, for example, to manage SDOs or SBOs, etc. in a different way than how the dynamic TreeView works.

To build a TreeView for these kinds of purposes however, you must do considerably more programming of calls to the TreeView APIs.