Overview of Trees

Trees are hierarchical data models that you can use to organize data, apply business rules, control data access, and improve performance while querying.

For example, an application maintains data of an organization called Vision Corporation that has two departments: Marketing and Finance. The Finance department has two functional divisions: Receivables and Payables. You can define a tree for Vision Corporation to establish a hierarchy across its departments, and their respective functional divisions. You can use the hierarchy to manage data at various levels of the organization.

To work with trees, in the Setup and Maintenance work area, use any of the following tasks:

• Manage Tree Structures: To create and update tree structures. You must first define a tree structure to create a tree.

• Manage Trees and Tree Versions: To create and update trees and their versions.

• Manage Tree Labels: To create and update tree labels.

Tree Structures

As the name suggests, tree structures provide you the framework to organize data such that you can establish a hierarchy for use by the tree. So, similar to a template, a tree structure guides the creation of a tree.

Tree

A tree is an instance of the tree structure. The root node is the highest nodal point of a tree. Child nodes branch off from the root node. Child nodes at the same level, branching off from a common parent node, are called siblings. Leaves are details branching off from a node but not extending further down the tree hierarchy. You can create trees for multiple data sources and share them across applications.

Tree Versions

A tree by default has only one version. If required, you can create and maintain more than one editable tree version. At any point, only one tree version must be active. If you edit an existing version, it changes from active to draft. To use it again, you must set it to active. Similar to any other version control system, versions of trees are maintained to track all the changes that a tree undergoes in its life cycle.

Tree Labels

Tree labels are short names given to trees and tree structures. You can label the tree versions for better accessibility and information retrieval. When nodes are created in a tree, the existing tree labels are automatically assigned to the new tree nodes. You can use any table to store the labels and register the label data source with the tree structure.