server-side interaction

[Albert Shenker]

How does one go about adding/removing/disabling "nodes"  in the tree server-side? How does one specify that certain nodes should be checkable, and others not?

[Kate]

Hi Albert,

Currently the RadDropDownTree control can only be bound to different datasources (as explained in this article). Considering your other question I would suggest that you use the OnNodeDataBound event and depending on your criteria you can set a node to be checkable or not as the below example:

protected void RadDropDownTree1_NodeDataBound(object sender, Telerik.Web.UI.DropDownTreeNodeDataBoundEventArguments e)
   {
       if (e.DropDownTreeNode.Text == "node1")
       {
           e.DropDownTreeNode.Checkable = true;
       }

   }

Regards,
Kate
Telerik

[Albert Shenker]

Thanks for the reply, but I'm not looking for binding help. I'm looking to add/remove items at run-time. The fact that Telerik released a tree-like control without a server-side "nodes" collection is pretty staggering. I have been a user of Telerik controls for almost 8 years and it seems oversights like this are becoming more and more prevalent. I certainly hope this will be rectified before the next major release. I can honestly say, and I think I speak for most developers, that I would have been more satisfied as a customer had Telerik never released this control (or released it only as a Beta) than having you release it in this incomplete manner. It would have saved me the time of trying to figure out how to do what should be simple in a control such as this.

[Kate]

Hello Albert,

Thank you for your feedback on the RadDropDownTree control. Let me explain in some details the reason behind the implementation of the RadDropDownTree and why currently there is not a way to add and/or remove nodes from the server side like most of our RadControls. Since the initial main purpose of the control is to be created in a way that it can be bound to different datasources we did not include the possibility to create the nodes on the server-side or in the mark-up. The main idea when designing the RadDropDownTree control was to improve the performance of the control in a scenario when a large amount of nodes is used and the design of the page requires the use of the RadComboBox and a RadTreeView controls. I will however, log your request in our internal system so that our developers can review it and consider it for a future improvement of the control.

Regards,
Kate
Telerik

[Albert Shenker]

With all due respect, your explanation is not convincing. Telerik has recently taken the fairly consequential step of announcing the deprecation of a number of skins, some of which are certain to be fairly widely used. The stated reasons for this are numerous, but the underlying reason is that, increasingly, you are finding it difficult to support such a large number of controls in your demo code base with so many skins. This justification is perfectly valid. But here you are telling me that Telerik released an entirely new control, with all of the online demos and documentation that goes with it, just to improve the performance of a fairly narrow and limited use case of the treeview in combo combination with a large number of nodes? This hardly sounds logical.

Instead, what is logical, is that Telerik saw that many people like to use treeviews in combo boxes in a variety of cases, and Telerik decided that it would be good from a performance and ease of developer  implementation standpoint to create a combined control. This makes perfect sense, and I commend Telerik for going in this direction, much like they have the new standalone AutoCompleteBox control. The problem is, in order to replace the Treeview in combo box combination with a single control and make it so developers adopt it, you need to replace the functionality of the former. Now, maybe for some obscure technical reason, it would be difficult to replace 100% of the treeview/combo functionality... but this cannot mean the exclusion of BASIC functionality like the ability to modify the treeview at runtime.

And this isn't even the only missing functionality in this control. There's an entire thread (http://www.telerik.com/community/forums/aspnet-ajax/dropdowntree/beta-control.aspx) which deals with other missing functionalities and questions whether this was supposed to be a beta release.

[Kate]

Hi Albert,

Thank you for your consistent interest. You are correct that not only the performance issue but also the number of our customers that use scenarios involving the RadComboBox and the RadTreeView control has provoked us to design controls like the RadDropDownTree or the RadAutocompleteBox.

Regarding the forum post that you mention, we have already implemented the requested features and you can observe the improvements in the beta demos here (please refer to the What's new section).

Regards,
Kate
Telerik

[Rumen]

Hello,

I just want to add a note about the planned skins deprecation.

We performed a representative survey as well as received feedback from different channels: (e-mails, tickets, feedback portals, forums and other) that clearly show that the most unpopular and rarely uses skins are Forest, Hay, Simple, Sunset, Sitefinity and Transparent. That is why we decided to obsolete exactly these skins.

What exactly does the skin deprecation means:

• this process will not influence anyhow the customers that do not plan to update their existing projects with new versions of RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX
• the obsolete skins will remain in the Telerik.Web.UI.Skins.dll assembly for quite a long period of time, until Q1 2014.
• After that the obsolete skins won't be deleted but moved to the Skin Sharing Portal so that they still can be used with the newer RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX versions.
• The users will be also able to import them in the Visual Style Builder and create skins for the new controls with it.
• Some additional notes: The Simple skin is almost the same as a structure as the Metro one and if needed the designers/ front end devs/ developers working with the controls could tweak it in the Visual Style Builder. All the other obsolete skins, except Sitefinity, are based on the Default skin. This means that they can import the Default skin and easily built your own skins based on it with the desired color schemes.
• We will definitely continue to create new nicely looking and modern skins in the future.

Best regards,
Rumen
Telerik

[Albert Shenker]

I'm glad you agree I am correct and that you have take steps in the current beta to overcome some of the glaring oversights in the release of this control. However, I don't necessarily see any indication that a server-side "nodes" property is among the features you have implemented. Any idea when such functionality might be worked on? Again, the lack of such functionality is pretty much a non starter as far as moving away from the tree-view in combo box implementation and to the new control.

P.S, I appreciate the lengthy exposition by Rumen, but my comments regarding skin deprecation weren't an attempt to say anything about whether that was good or bad. I think most reasonable people can understand why you would want to reduce the number of skins you have and the manner in which you decided which to deprecate is fine. I only brought it up because the issue showed that you have reason not to release new controls in some haphazard fashion and the excuse given by Kate for why the dropdown tree release was done with so much missing functionality was a poor one.

[Kate]

Hi Albert,

Thank you very much for your feedback. It is indeed very important for us so that our products keep on accommodating your needs and the needs of any other customer that would require such functionality. The ability to add/remove nodes on the server side is already logged in our internal system so that our developers can consider it for future implementation. Furthermore, in order for you and anyone else interested  in the progress of the functionality to keep track on it, I made this feature request public. Below you can find a link that redirects to request that you submitted - IMPROVE: RadDropDownTree - include functionality to Add/Remove node on the server-side
 
Regards,
Kate
Telerik