Sorting JTree results in collapse of nodes!

Question

I've searched and searched and can not find a good example of how to do this. I've found many threads that pose the question with the only answer being something like "I figured it out, thanks anyway".
My problem:
I've got a tree, many nodes, many depths. I'd like to sort it. My present algorithm is to traverse the tree and sort the list of children of each node. Once I sort the children, obviously the indexes have changed, so you must correct them.
I've tried:
remove all children from the parent
add the children in sorted order
If I do that using something like parent.remove and parent.insert, thats fine as long as no children UNDER those children have been expanded. If they have, then I'm not accounting for them and thus the tree continues to show those children under the wrong nodes once the sorted nodes are added.
If I do that using something like model.removeNodeFromParent and model.insertNodeInto, then the entire tree will collapse up to the node sorted on.
Either way sucks!
I've also tried passing Arrays.sort my own comparator that, depending on the compare outcome, will do the removeFromParent and insertNodeInto on the fly. This results in NOT collapsing the entire tree (probably because all nodes are never removed) however it seems like on a descending sort the nodes get messed up. I assumed this was because I was reordering them on the fly in the tree...but now that I'm thinking about it, maybe I was doing something else wrong.
In any case, is there a standard proceedure for doing this? Why does it seem so difficult? I've spent a good two days on this. Crazy!

Answer 1

Found this in another thread after all, might be my solution:
     public Vector savePaths() {
          Vector v = new Vector();
          for (int i=0; i<getTree().getRowCount(); i++) {
               if (getTree().isExpanded(i)) {
                    v.add(getTree().getPathForRow(i));
          return v;
     public void loadPaths(Vector v) {
          for (int i=0; i><v.size(); i++) {          
               getTree().expandPath((TreePath) v.get(i));
     }