Complex xml in tree control

Question

every example you see online is trivial and utterly useless
for practical programming purposes...typically you'll see something
like this:
<mx:XML format="e4x" id="myMenuModel">
<root label="Menu">
<menuitem label="MenuItem A">
<menuitem label="SubMenuItem 1-A"/>
<menuitem label="SubMenuItem 2-A" />
</menuitem>
<menuitem label="MenuItem B"/>
<menuitem label="MenuItem C" type="check"/>
<menuitem type="separator"/>
<menuitem label="MenuItem D">
<menuitem label="SubMenuItem 1-D" type="radio"
groupName="one"/>
<menuitem label="SubMenuItem 2-D" type="radio"
groupName="one"/>
<menuitem label="SubMenuItem 3-D" type="radio"
groupName="one"/>
</menuitem>
</root>
</mx:XML>
...just hard coded simplistic xml which is fine and dandy if
you have a simple xml schema and all the leaves of your tree can be
keyed off the same "label" attribute. But what if you have a
complex, deeply nested XML file that doesn't follow this nice
pattern? What if I want to pull different attributes from different
levels in the tree to display, is that even possible? Or what if I
dont want to use the attribute at all for my display label in the
tree, what if I want to use an element node name? Like for example,
say I had:
<department label="marketing">
<employee name="Eric Cartman" Age="8">
<interest>
<type>food</type>
<name>cheesiepoofs</name>
</interest>
<interest>
<type>pets</type>
<name>mr. kitty</name>
</interest>
</employee>
Is there a way I can build my tree to use the department
'label' attribute for the top level, the employee 'name' attribute
for the second level and the <type> element nested under
<interest> for the third level?
I confess I'm a Flex newbie but any other language I've
worked provides a mechanism to tailor this sort of thing to
individual business cases. Any insight would be greatly
appreciated.
thank you.
S

Answer 1

Another approach is parse your complex xml into objects and
then create your own
tree datadescriptor. This is described in the help. Search on
"custom tree datadescriptor"
We use this approach because the xml we want to display in a
tree does not fit nicely. So we wrote a parser that converts the
xml into "TreeObjects" (our class) and created the custom tree
datadescriptor to handle it. When we create the tree object we can
control the data used for the label so it displays correctly.