Tree structure

[Marco Nawijn]

On Jul 26, 6:53 am, Bevan Jenkins <beva... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am trying to create a tree structure for use with a PyQt QTreeView.
> But first I need to get my head around how to create the tree
> structure.  I have a dictionary (for testing purposes) but I will
> later use a table via sqlalchemy.
>
> The use case is hydrology, so I  would like to have a hydrologically
> connected river tree, in which you can browse upstream from the sea
> (making choices) or downstream from any named hydrological feature.
> Each key flows into its value pair. myrivers =
> {"river":"flows_into"}.  An example is below:
>
> myrivers = {"little stream":"sea",
>     "mountain stream":"lake",
>     "lake":"big river",
>     "cold spring":"big river",
>     "big river":"sea"
>     "sea":""}
>
> I would like the tree to look like (if the formatting works....). so
> you can browse downstream from each named river but also upstream from
> the sea picking which direction to go.
>
> little stream
>     sea
> mountain stream
>     lake
>         big river
>             sea
> lake
>     big river
>         sea
> cold spring
>     big river
>         sea
> big river
>     sea
> sea
>     little stream
>     big river
>         lake
>             mountain stream
>         cold spring
>
> <<this next part is probably not very clear>>
> So every key is a parent.  For all keys that have a value (not ""),
> the value is the child and is then used as a parent to get the next
> child until the sea and a value of "" is reached.  For the sea this is
> reversed, that you find all rivers that flow into the sea and then all
> rivers that flow into them.
>
> Any thoughts about how to acomplish this will be much appreciated,
> Bevan

Hello Bevan,

Is it an option to use XML as an in-memory representation. It
naturally provides the
interface you need, like traversing from parent to children and back.
In addition, you
get querying capabilities like XPATH for free. In python I recommend
lxml.

Your task than is to fill the tree based on the information in the
database. The ORM functionality
from sqlalchemy will be of help here. In addition, you somehow have to
populate the QT tree with the
data from your in-memory XML representation. I have no experience with
QT so I cannot help you there.

Regards,

Marco