Chapter 17. Trees

One crucial component that found its way into the Swing set is the tree. Tree components help you visualize hierarchical information and make traversal and manipulation of that information much more manageable. A tree consists of nodes, which can contain either a user-defined object along with references to other nodes, or a user-defined object only. (Nodes with no references to other nodes are commonly called leaves.) In modern windowing environments, the directory list is an excellent example of a tree. The top of the component is the root directory or drive, and under that is a list of subdirectories. If the subdirectories contain further subdirectories, you can look at those as well. The actual files found in any directory in this component are the leaves of the tree.

Any data with parent-child relationships can be displayed as a tree. Another common example is an organizational chart. In such a chart, every management position is a node, with child nodes representing the employees under the manager. The organizational chart's leaves are the employees who are not in management positions, and its root is the president or CEO. Of course, real organizations don't always adhere to a strict tree structure. In a tree, each node has exactly one parent node, with the exception of the root node, which cannot have a parent (so trees are not cyclic). This means—in the world of trees—that two managers cannot manage the same employee.

In short, whenever you have a clearly defined hierarchy, you can express that hierarchy as a tree. Swing implements trees with the JTree class and its related models. With trees, as with tables, it's particularly important to understand the models. The JTree itself merely coordinates the tree's display.