Sean Gerety : Introducing the multi-direction treeview

posted on Friday, November 21, 2003 12:24 PM by Sean Gerety

Introducing the multi-direction treeview

Ok, my last post was truly lame. So in an effort to redeem myself, I have come up with an ideal for a multi-directional treeview. I’m sure at this point you’re asking yourself…

Why?

Because information that relates to a timeline or group construct may not always be conveyed in a treeview. If you take my example of photos, I group my photos by date, and then within those years I breakout items by smaller units called months. While a classic treeview will give you a view of the years, when you expand the view for months you lose the timeline context. So I needed a better way to convey the timeline aspect.

So what would I use this for?

Take the photo example. Say you have all of the years and months expanded and you could then click on individual months and in a separate panel get thumbnails of all the select months’ photos. Another feature would be “row” or “column” selection. You could select a like “row” of siblings from parents or parental columns and see all of the photos from May for each year.

Another example would be that of a web farm. You could view all web servers and database servers for a site. Then view properties of each item. Or select a row of items from the web servers and modify those values.

Below are some mockup images.

Concept with closed root - notice the "+" is now a "->"