I have a client who has a database that has nodes. Each node can have zero or more children, and zero or more parents, although usually the number of parents is exactly one. All nodes are unique, and there are no loops.

The task is to build a "browser" for the database, to wander through looking for parents and kids to find a particular node, and to search for nodes meeting a given set of criteria.

Initially, the client built a tool that uses an Explorer-style interface in HTML, with little "+" boxes to expand out a subtree. This is working fine until we get to the requirement that a node might have multiple parents. The underlying code is using Tree::DAG_node. Oops. {grin}

So, I've got to rewrite that, but then I'm also going to be hacking the GUI code then as well. I'm not much of a user interface designer, so I'm wondering if there are any models for me to draw on of browsing a structure that has few parents and many children, but is not strictly a tree.

Any clues out there? I'll be most appreciative.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

In reply to Representing the result of a node search in HTML by merlyn

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