RE: Clever ideas to do toc...

Meltsner, Kenneth J (Kenneth.J.Meltsner@jci.com)
Tue, 8 Sep 1998 11:53:35 -0500

You could swipe a good idea from the relational database folks, and number
the tree nodes sequentially, and then select a sub-tree based on a range of
node numbers. I've lost the original reference (from DBMS Magazine) but
here's a quick example from a similar problem:

Hierarchical organizational trees:

1. Company (1,6)
2. Department A (2,4)
3. Group A1 (3,3)
4. Group A2 (4,4)
5. Department B (5,6)
6. Group B1 (6,6)

This allows you to represent the whole company, hierarchical info, etc. in
one table. A node that contains additional nodes can be expanded by
showing the range of nodes listed for that parent node . It doesn't handle
more complicated relationships, such as multiple parents, though.

As I'm not enough of an XML type to be sure, should the node number and
range info be shoved into an attribute (during authoring) or should it be
generated as the document is parsed?