Tree views - Best design practices

[MRAB]

Filip Gruszczyński wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I have certain design problem, which I cannot solve elegantly. Maybe
> you know some good design patterns for this kind of tasks.
> 
> Task:
> 
> We have a model which has two kinds of objects: groups and elements.
> Groups can hold other groups (subgroups) and elements. It's a simple
> directory tree, for example. We would like to display it in a tree
> view (which sound good for this kind of model). What is more required,
> for groups and elements there are different sets of operations, which
> should be available under right click. For example for group, there
> should be operations: 'add element' and 'add group', and for element
> there should be 'change properties'.
> 
> Do you know any smart way to achieve this? The simplest way is to ask
> for the class and display operations accordingly. But from the first
> day with OO programming I have heard, that asking for class is wrong.
> But I can hardly see any easy and more maintainable solution for this
> problem. Could you help me with this?
> 
You could ask the object what the operations are. Here's an example 
using strings:

 >>> class Element(object):
	operations = "Element operations"

	
 >>> class Group(object):
	operations = "Group operations"

	
 >>> e = Element()
 >>> g = Group()
 >>>
 >>> e.operations
'Element operations'
 >>> g.operations
'Group operations'