I‘ve not written a while about programming, let alone anything about that mailing program, RoundAbout. Today’s subject is the Windows TreeView control and its data section, the TreeNodes. As you probably know, a TreeView shows data in an hierarchical way, allowing users to ‘expand’ or ‘close’ so-called TreeNodes, so to expose or hide data they do and don’t want to see. TreeNodes in the Windows world can have user-data attached to it and often, developers will use this to store program specific information. I believe in .Net, this data propery is called ‘Tag’: in the Delphi world, it was called plainly ‘Data’. So code-wise this could look like this:
var Node: TTreeNode;
/* FolderData is a pointer to a record */
Node := TreeView.Items.AddChild(Node, FolderData^.Name);
/* Attach the FolderData to the current node */
Node.Data := FolderData;
Early in the process of development, it was noticed that any font or even layout changes caused severe crashes in the TreeView: The TreeView in RoundAbout holds account and message/mail folder information via each TreeNode’s Data member. After a long investigation, I noticed that this was caused by the Delphi TreeView control itself: whenever a window anywhere was refreshed, Windows would send a message to the TreeView control to refresh and recreate itself. Let me say that again: whenever a font was changed in RoundAbout, this would trigger any TreeView to recreate itself. I think this issue was resolved in later versions of Delphi, but I decided to create my own control (PMTreeView, code here) to preserve the data with the following premises:
- Override CreateWnd and DestroyWnd
- Upon destruction of the treeview window, save the data for the nodes to a memorystream.
- Upon creation of the treeview window, (if available) load the node data from the memorystream.
- Trigger an event to notify the developer that the Data structure has changed for further activities.
As I mentioned earlier, I believe in subsequent Delphi versions, Borland fixed this in their own TreeView controls. However, for a piece of code that I debugged and coded in a night or so, my own PMTreeView control wasn’t too bad of an implementation.