Treeview replacement in Metro

Question

A treeview is one of the controls which has probably seen decades of existence across various legacy technologies and it just amazes me how this fundamental control is left out from the Metro application framework when you are using VB.Net or C# ... I would have thought that since the model were driven heavily by XAML it would have been simple to port it over from WPF technologies as it is available there as a control ...

Don't know yet what approach I will take to tackle this problem as it seems a huge waste of time to be implementing my own TreeView when I could be implementing an application in the same time ...

Are there any solutions for this Microsoft? I refuse to accept that I will have to roll out my own Treeview or use a third party control! I also refuse to accept that the a design consideration needs to be done in terms of Metro as hierarchical data has no better solution then a Treeview - all other solutions indicated in various other posts are more of a hack than anything else.

All comments appreciated.

Answer 1

maybe take a look how the mail is done?

Answer 2

hmmm I have had a look at the Mail application and first impressions is that it is not production standard yet. Basically syncing issues with folders and emails.

I am inclined to roll out my own Treeview for this :(

I haven't had any responses apart from yours Dave. Would have been great to get some more community feedback or a response from Microsoft :)

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Neil Goundar

Answer 3

well i think treeview is bad control for touch.. you have to make the treenodes quiet big that it get messy.. personally i like how they solved it in the mail program.

Answer 4

Am I missing something here? I can see that the Mail Application has a Treeview like display. Only difference from a Treeview I can see is that you cannot expand or collapse it. Is there some other application you are referring to? Screenshot below on what I can see:

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Neil Goundar

Answer 5

Hi Neil,

You can use a list view and simple use css or manually pad the items over to make them appear they are in a tree arrangement.  No there is nothing built in to do this auto-magically for you.

-Jeff

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Jeff Sanders (MSFT)

Answer 6

Hi Jeff,

Thank you for your response. I had a chance to go to a reseller expo in Auckland where a session on Windows 8 was done. As part of it tablets running windows 8 were placed for demo.

While using the demo tablet I came to a realization that using it using a mouse and keyboard are quite different then using it with touch. Up to now I have been playing with Windows 8 in  a Hyper-V virtual machine using a keyboard and mouse.

Coming back to my point and I am hoping these conclusions I make will help other developers on what I think for a TreeView based on using it on a touch tablet:

• Expand/Collapse functionality of a treeview would not be ideal in a touch based scenario as the expand collapse icon would need to be pretty large and may start looking horrible (unless expand and collapse is done on the node selection
• Right clicking as we usually do it with a mouse would become irrelevant on a touch based input. I will need to do further research on this.

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Neil Goundar

Answer 7

Dave, After using it on a touch tablet I now see the point you were making here :) Thanks for your responses.

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Neil Goundar

Answer 8

You can see another interpretation of how to handle tree like structures by looking at the File picker (music app uses one to open files from the app bar).

-Jeff

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Jeff Sanders (MSFT)

Answer 9

Here's another interpretation for Metro style hierarchy. This approach starts with the Grid style. See 'Blend Demo: Using GroupStype to Create Hierarchical app Navigation' demo on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR83admQF4g).

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RT

Answer 10

I am not convinced that this YouTube clip I posted by BlendInsider is hierarchical despite the clip's name. The Grid app template is not, and now that I have worked though his GroupStyle steps, I don't see that he is adding any handlers that would make the content hierarchical, that is, recursive like a file/folder system is.

Of course, the word Grid implies non-recursive like a x-y spreadsheet. Linguistically, however, there is nothing prohibiting consecutive grids from being recursively hierarchical to infinity. I just don't think the Blend guys have fully addressed the issue between non- vs. recursive hierarchical-ness.

By the way, BlendInsider is the program manager as revealed in one of his videos.

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RT