Extension talk:Treeview5.php

This talk page pertains specifically to the development of this extension. For more general discussion about bugs and usage etc, please refer to the mediawiki.org talk page at MW:Extension talk:Tree view

A more logical way of approaching a treeview in MediaWiki is for the PHP extension part to concentrate on allowing the bullet lists (and maybe numbered lists too) to work recusively with transclusion, and for the tree rendering to be handled by existing JavaScript components such as DTree which are very good and packed with features such as persistence between pages.

Note: If this extension is going to use an external tool, we could for the fork and rename of the extension to Extension:DTree.php, as it is now going to be an interface to a javascript application. There is currently no extension on MediaWiki called MW:Extension:DTree.

Treeview4 already handles the recursion aspect well and has been written in a much more modular way than Treeview3 allowing it to be independent of the tree rendering. But with this version I'd like to make the list-recursion work without any parser-function syntax at all - i.e. essentially to fix the MediaWiki parser's limitation of not allowing transclusion to work properly with lists as in the following example.

*Foo
**Bar
**{{:Baz}}
**Fodda

The new version would allow the Baz article (if it were a bullet list) to be properly nested at the correct level in the parent tree. This would simply be based on the fact that the transclusion is directly after an asterisk.

The #tree parser-function would still be used to make bullet lists into trees, but would be optional and would simple wrap the structure in the appropriate HTML to activate the DTree JavaScript tree.

Persistance

How does http://www.destroydrop.com/javascripts/tree/ DTree] handle persistance? Looks like it does it through cookies, see dtree.js, line 36.

If it does it by saving temporary files we would want a temporary file location for the trees and a GUID such as [ArticleName]-[Database revision]

See also

• DTree (javascript based)
• Slipstream wp-Dtree (php based)

Dtree API

See file api.html in the DTree directory. Basically this extension need to provide an interface from a parser function which deals with nested bullet lists to creating the javascript output. At the bullet list stage the php function htmlspecialchars on the input to prevent cross site scripting. See HTML Code Injection and Cross-site scripting for details.

Open/Close parser function

A dedicated parser function which provides functionality to open/close the clades of the tree would be useful.

<p><a href="javascript: d.openAll();">open all</a> | <a href="javascript: d.closeAll();">close all</a></p>

This example generates a tree similar to the example01.html provided with dtree

{{#tree:openlevels=4
*Node 1
**Node 1.1
***Node 1.1.1
****Node 1.1.1.1
*Node 2
*Node 3
*Node 4
*My Pictures
**The trip to Iceland
**Mom's birthday
*Recycle bin
}}