Can you data bind a TreeView control?

Question

Typically, when I use the standard TreeView control that comes with C#/VB I write my own methods to transfer data in and out of the Tree's internal hierarchy store.

There might be ways to "bind" the GUI to a data store that I can point to (such as XML files), and when the user edits the tree items, it should save it back into the store. Is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

I got around it by creating a class that Inherits TreeNode and contains an object. you can then bind a record to the node and recall it during the Click or DoubleClick event. Eg.

class TreeViewRecord:TreeNode
    {
        private object DataBoundObject { get; set; }

        public TreeViewRecord(string value,object dataBoundObject)
        {
            if (dataBoundObject != null) DataBoundObject = dataBoundObject;
            Text = value;
            Name = value;
            DataBoundObject = dataBoundObject;
        }

        public TreeViewRecord()
        {
        }

        public object GetDataboundObject()
        {
            return DataBoundObject;
        }
    }

then you can bind to each node as you build your TreeView eg.

TreeView.Nodes.Add(new TreeViewRecord("Node Text", BoundObject));
//or for subNode
TreeView.Nodes[x].Nodes.Add(new TreeViewRecord("Node Text", BoundObject));

Then you can bind the DoubleClick event to something like this

private void TreeViewDoubleClick(object sender, TreeNodeMouseClickEventArgs e)
        {
             object exp = ((TreeViewRecord) e.Node).GetDataboundObject();
             //Do work
        }