(2006-05-28) Changed license to Apache Software License 2.0.
(2003-05-06) Added target attribute support
(2002-10-10) Added reload method
About a year ago Emil visited me while I was living in USA and he came up with a brilliant idea for a next generation DHTML tree. After some discussions about this it took shape and in the end it turned out to be one of the best DHTML tree scripts I've ever seen.
Since the original xTree script is implemented using Object Oriented JS it is very easy to extend and as soon as it started to take shape we got some wild ideas on how one could extend the tree. One idea that Emil implemented in the original tree was to add support for persistance. Another idea I had some time later was to allow subtrees to be loaded and populated at runtime. For this to work the xTree had to be updated a little to support data model changes at runtime. Emil added support for this after a while and now nothing was in my way to add the dynamic loading support.
The XLoadTree is an extended version of the xTree and it allows you to define a source property for each tree item that points to an xml file that is then loaded, transformed using DOM and inserted using tree item methods. The basic mechanism for this has been working for a long time but since I wanted to cover the xml loading mechanisms before writing this article it is not until now that I can publish this.
The persistance from the original xTree is not sophisticated enough for dynamic loaded trees because the original persistance is dependent on the order of insertion and not the path. I will try to fix this in a later update.
The xml object has some issues when using the file protocol (in IE) so this one only works when located on a web server. I'll see what can be done about this.