Displaying a trie in a JTree

Question

I've thrown together a really simple class implementing a Patricia trie (see http://hissa.nist.gov/dads/HTML/patriciatree.html) for auto-completion of words. What I now want to do is display the trie in a JTree view. The problem I'm encountering is that the trie is mutable, and I need it to update whenever a new word is inserted into the trie (possible causing a node to split e.g., inserting "application" causes the "apple" node to split into "appl" with children "e" and "ication"). Nothing I've tried so far makes the JTree update properly.
Can someone suggest a way of solving this? I'm just putting together the JTree representation for a friend as a way of representing the trie visually, and I don't want to spend too much time on this if someone's already got a simple solution.
Thanks,
R. Tony Goold

Answer 1

I use subclasses of DefaultMutableTreeNode for the nodes in my JTrees and I use subclasses of DefaultTreeModel as the controller for the JTrees. Whenever the tree model changes the tree's structure, it calls the appropriate method whose name is something like "nodeChanged". That's the simple solution. If that doesn't sound familiar to you, look at the tutorial here:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/components/tree.html