Building Some Web TreeViews

The TreeView control in ASP.NET 2.0 is used to display hierarchical data, such as table of contents or file directory in a tree structure. In most applications that I do, I use the TreeView control to show file directory structure. I was able to create a class that populates a TreeView provided with a physical directory structure residing on the same computer as to where the server is running. Rename the file below to .dll and use it as a reference on your web application. Once added to your web application usage would be:

using System;
// include other namespaces as needed
using PhysicalTreeView;

public partial class Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        string location;
        pTreeView ptv = new pTreeView(location);
        // the example below is valid without specifying the "isWeb" to false.
        pTreeView ptv = new pTreeView("~/");
        ptv.isWeb = false;
        ptv.PopulateTree(TreeView1);
    }
}

By default, the variable location will treat the path as a virtual path. If you want to specify a specific physical directory, you can specify the 8 character directory format as a location value but you need to specify the property “isWeb” as “false” and as shown above. The “TreeView1″ is assumed to be a TreeView control placed onto the ASPX file. For testing purposes, you can put in your code behind the following code without placing a TreeView control in your ASPX file but will output the same.

TreeView TreeView1 = new TreeView();
string location;
pTreeView ptv = new pTreeView(location);
// the example below is valid without specifying the "isWeb" to false.
pTreeView ptv = new pTreeView("~/");
ptv.isWeb = false;
ptv.PopulateTree(TreeView1);

this.Form.Controls.Add(TreeView1);

Physical Drive TreeView DLL

The challenge for me is to bring the same functionality to a SourceSafe database which is despite having a directory like structure isn’t directory based at all when accessed programmatically. Furthermore, the DLL provided with Visual Source Safe 2005 isn’t a native .NET object but a COM interop one.

Luckily, using the same logic behind the previous DLL, I managed to create a DLL to populate a TreeView from a SourceSafe database. The constructor needs only 3 parameters namely the database location, username, and password.

Sample usage would be:

using ProjectTreeView;

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {

        string location, user, password;
        // Populate your own values

        ssTreeView stv = new ssTreeView(location, user, password);
        stv.BuildSourceSafeTree(TreeView1);

    }
}

Same with the code above, the code assumes that there’s a TreeView control instance in the ASPX file that has an ID of “TreeView1″.

Sourcesafe TreeView

For questions, feel free to add some comments.

Sourcesafe Automation Bug

As part of my continuing project in Sourcesafe Automation, I found a weird behavior of the Visual Studio Sourcesafe Interop DLL.

The following code is in Visual Basic 5 which basically connects to a Sourcesafe database and lists all the projects in the root folder of the database.

Dim vssdb As New VSSDatabase
 
vssdb.Open "<location to sourcesafe srcsafe.ini>", "<username>", "<password>"
 
Dim xitem As VSSItem
For Each xitem In vssdb.VSSItem(0).Items(False)
   Debug.Print (xitem.Name)
Next

Subsequently, the code equivalent in C# (.NET) , is something that I have blogged before. What I find unusual about the Sourcesafe Interop DLL are the following items:

Sourcesafe Automation Tips

I am currently playing with the Visual Sourcesafe Automation for implementation in one of my projects. I was trying to traverse the files of a specific project (aka folder) and the code in Visual Basic.NET works like this:

Dim vssDB As IVSSDatabase = New VSSDatabase
vssDB.Open("srcsafe.ini location", "username", "password")
Dim sfolder As VSSItem
sfolder = vssDB.VSSItem("$/MyProject").Items(True).Item(1)

Dim xItem As VSSItem

For Each xItem In sfolder.Items(False)
System.Diagnostics.Debug.Print(xItem.Name & " - " & xItem.VersionNumber)
'xItem.Checkout()
'xItem.Checkin()
'xItem.Get("c:\\temp1")
Next

If I want to perform some of the operations (such as check in/out), I just have to modify the lines in the for each loop to work. Since I am a C# developer, I translated the same code and it appears like this:

IVSSDatabase vssDB = new VSSDatabase();
vssDB.Open("srcsafe.ini location", "username", "password");
VSSItem sfolder;

sfolder = vssDB.VSSItem("$/MyProject").Items(true).Item(1);

VSSItem xItem;

foreach ( xItem in sfolder.Items(false)) {
System.Diagnostics.Debug.Print(xItem.Name + " - " + xItem.VersionNumber);
//xItem.Checkout();
//xItem.Checkin();
//xItem.Get("c:\\temp1");
}

What keeps me wondering is that the code for VB works while the one for C# had errors. Specifically on line 5, it triggers an error that the VSSItem is not supported by the language. I made a workaround on the structure and the working version is this:

IVSSDatabase vssDB = new VSSDatabase();
vssDB.Open("srcsafe.ini location", "username", "password");
VSSItem sfolder;

sfolder = (VSSItem)vssDB.get_VSSItem("$/MyWebsite", false);

foreach ( VSSItem xItem in sfolder.get_Items(false)) {
string outputdisplay = xItem.Name + " - " + xItem.VersionNumber + "<br />";
Response.Write(outputdisplay);
//xItem.Checkout("comments_here", "checkout_location", 0);
//xItem.Checkin("comments_here", "checkout_location", 0);
}

Since C# doesn’t accept optional parameters, you need to fill-in for the parameters. I hope this one helps and makes sense for those who are working on Sourcesafe Automation.