PeopleSoft Tree Manager 5: Winter Trees, Summer Tree, and Spring Trees

PeopleSoft application has a foundation called Tree Manager. It is the reusable component and design pattern widely used in PeopleSoft applications.

It has an interesting notions of Winter Tree, Summer Tree, and Spring Tree.

• A winter tree uses the detail value table for nodes and has no leaves.
• A summer tree uses the PS_TREE_NODE table for nodes and a detail value table for leaves.
• A spring tree is a hybrid between a node-only winter tree and a summer tree. A spring tree uses a detail value table for the nodes as well as the leaves.

The differentiation of whether the tree has leaves or not is important because it determines how the department or individual field values are attached to the tree. In a winter tree, every single node has a department associated with it. In other word, each node represents a department. In a summer tree, nodes represent the grouping of the departments and each node does not represent a specific department.