Coldfusion 8's CFTREE tag

Coldfusion 8 introduced support for an HTML tree. With the HTML tree you can build an AJAX driven tree, which means you only need to load the to level nodes at first and all subsequent child nodes and leaves are only loaded when needed. The old requirements of the cftree tag, that being living inside of a cfform still exists.

You set up your tree like so:

The bind expression, like in my previous post about the cfgrid, is used to bind the creation of the tree elements to the output of a CFC.

Your cfc should return an array of structures that contain a value and a display value for nodes and an additional key "leafnode"=true when you want to show a leaf.

I created a simple function that would generate a two level tree just for example purposes.

Since the tree binds directly to the cfc, and is therefore called immediately on generating the tree, we need to make sure that we only generate the top level nodes once, that is why we check arguments.value at the very top. If arguments.value eq '' then we generate the parent nodes, otherwise we process the children.

The default styling of the cftree is pretty ugly so you may want to create your own styles.