🌳 Treecle

Need to handle tree-like objects? We’ve got you covered.

🌳 Treecle

Need to handle tree-like objects? We’ve got you covered! Work in progress, try at your own risk.

Features:

Utility functions for:

Installation

npm install treecle

or

import * as treecle from "https://treecle.mavo.io/dist/treecle.js";

Or import functions individually from src.

Usage

For details on what functions exist and their signatures, see the API docs.

This page exposes a global treecle object for experimentation. Open the console and try things out!

Data shape

Treecle is designed to work with tree-like objects, where nodes are objects and edges are properties. Arrays are used to represent multiple children of a node. Arrays of arrays have no meaning in such a structure.

However, these constraints are not enforced, and whenever it would not be costly in terms of performance, treecle does try to handle data gracefully.

Parent pointers

Certain methods like closest() and children.replace() depend on parent pointers, i.e. being able to get from a node to its parent. When Treecle traverses an object, it also stores a path from the object to its parent. To avoid mutating the object, this is stored in a private WeakMap, but you can access it via parents.path(node). To ensure every node in a (sub)tree has a parent pointer, use parents.update(root).

Getting a node’s children

By default, Treecle assumes that every property that points to an object is a parent-child relationship. You can customize this by importing the config object and setting config.getChildProperties to a function that returns the child properties of a node as an array of strings.

You can also override config.isNode(node) to be more specific about what should be considered a node. By default it considers all plain objects (i.e. not instances of a class other than Object) are cobsidered nodes.

Configuration

The following sections detail the different ways to configure Treecle.

Default configuration

This example shows how to use Treecle right out of the box, with the default configuration assuming that all objects are child nodes.

import { find } from "treecle";

const tree = {
  value: 1,
  left: {
	value: 2,
  },
  right: {
	value: 3,
  },
};

const node = find(tree, (node) => node.value === 3);

console.log(node); // { value: 3 }

Providing custom configuration

This example shows how to customize Treecle to work with a tree-like object where children are stored in an array called children.

import Treecle, { find } from "treecle";

const tree = {
	value: 1,
	type: "root",
	children: [
		{
			type: "leaf",
			value: 2,
		},
		{
			type: "leaf",
			value: 3
		}
	]
}

// Create a new instance of Treecle with custom configuration
const treecle = new Treecle({
	getChildProperties: node => node.type === "leaf" ? [] : ["children"],
	isNode: node => Boolean(node.value)
});

const node = find.call(treecle, tree, node => node.value === 3);

console.log(node); // { type: 'leaf', value: 3 }

Permanently override configuration

If your tree schema will never change, you can also choose to permanently override the configuration to avoid having to call all Treecle's functions with a context object passed in.

import { find, defaults } from "treecle";

// Override the default configuration permanently
defaults.getChildProperties = node => node.type === "leaf" ? [] : ["children"];
defaults.isNode = node => Boolean(node.value);


const tree = {
	value: 1,
	type: "root",
	children: [
		{
			type: "leaf",
			value: 2,
		},
		{
			type: "leaf",
			value: 3
		}
	]
}

const node = find(tree, node => node.value === 3);

console.log(node); // { type: "leaf", value: 3 }