Sunday, June 22, 2008

PeopleSoft Tree Manager 8: Skip Level Tree

The PeopleSoft Tree Manager allows you to create a tree with some of the node skipping levels. Skipping level means that the parent child relationships are not strictly validated by the level the node belong to.

The Tree Levels are created as part of the tree instance, not as part of the tree structure. That is the tree levels can change from a tree version to the other version. The same Tree Name and SETID may have different level definitions.

You can add levels before you build the tree (by adding tree nodes to its parent nodes) or add levels during you build the tree.

When you build a tree, you can turn the display option "Display Level" on in order to see the levels.

You can then see the name of level for the tree node that you created or added to the tree. The level is default based on the level of the tree you add. You can change the " level" with any level below the assigned level and the tree manager will change the indentation for displaying theode tree.

Skipping level is a powerful feature for reporting.
When viewing the data, the expectation is to not see the dummy nodes. You should be able to see the skip level nodes as the immediate parent from the parent node.

A typical implementation to support the skip level hierarchy is to store the hierarchies as a parent/child relationship. I guess that this is how PeopleSoft Tree Manager supports it. You should not see a dummy node and see the summary of the child nodes to the dummy node.

1 comment:

Sean said...

Dylan, I am having a problem with tree levels when modifying a tree. In the original version of the tree, the highest level node is at level 1. All descendent (children, grandchildren, etc) nodes are at level 0. When I move one of the grandchildren to a different parent, the level of the grandchild changes from 0 to 2 and I cannot change it back to 0 (level 0 is not an option any longer). This is causing some of our reporting to be incorrect as data is not being retrieved for the grandchild any more. Any thoughts?