posted 14 years ago
I believe the return value of isLeaf determines whether or not to show the expand icon. There are now two options:
- always return false; but then even leafs will appear as non-leafs
- fetch the children when needed, but only when needed
I've written a TreeModel implementation that uses the second technique. It loads the data anytime one of the methods that involve the children is called and the data wasn't loaded before. This does not mean that the entire tree is prefetched; only the direct children of the visible nodes are prefetched. So if initially you only show the root, then only the root's children are prefetched. If you open the root, the children of the root's children will be prefetched, etc.
Now, if you can store the number of children in the elements, then you don't need this. Simply let isLeaf return whether this number is 0 or not. Then load the data when the node is expanded.