[pgadmin-hackers] Pains and thoughts about refactoring the Tree Menu using React

Hi Hackers,

After a conversation with Dave we believe that we need to provide more context on our pains and what we propose as a first step for implementing the Tree Menu using React.

The pain:

Here is a quick description of what we think we understand and where we got stuck while doing our refactor.

If you look at the above image, both the NodeJS and CollectionJS classes are templates. Our goal was to extract those from being templates so that we could test them. We started with the generate_url function. The issue we ran into was that the generate_url function is inherited by CollectionJS from NodeJS but then over writes some of the functionality that it inherits. In order to have one function that our react component would delegate to, we have to consolidate these two class methods. This turned out to be a non-trivial refactor due to the lack of tests/documentation.

Our proposal:

This diagram represents what we believe can be our first approach to updating the tree. We can create a very basic tree that only does tree stuff (Open Node, Close Nodes) and then delegates to other adapters to execute all the business logic functionality (Generate URLs to get the node, Right Click menu, …)

Asks:

• Are there any more operation that currently are being triggered by the tree? If so we need to add them to the Adapter List.

• Because we lack the context and knowledge of the current tree implementation, we need your help to extract these methods from the places they are currently in. We believe that a good place to start would be writing tests for and implementing the generation of URLs used to fetch the child nodes.

Attached you can find an example of the JavaScript tests that we have been writing that can be applied to this extracted method.