Handling GtkTree Views

[Guenther Sohler <guenther sohler newlogic com>]

Hallo List,

I plan to use GtkTreeView in my application to display a quite complicated data
structure to the user. One Element/Row in the view corresponds to one item in
the data structure.

Its like

instance
        subinstance
        parameter
        other entity
                subsubinstance
                parameter

just a little bit more complicated

There I have some problems i want to work out, and some of you could help me:

* As a instance can have many subinstances in parallel, memory consumtion to
store the data is low, but memory for building the tree will be allocated
flat once for every instance. If I have a deep structure, memory consumption and
tree building time might become much. Is there a possibility the build the tree
on the fly, just in that way it is viewed ?
How can I free the tree at the very end ?

* When TreeView is build, in principle Data is duplicated. When the user edits,
  I have to worry about editing the orginal data AND the displayed GtkTree View
  in place. 
  I could overcome this by just modifying the orginal data and completely
rebuilding the tree, but I would lose the information about the currently
opened tree and the selection. this would be very annoying for the user to 
always reopen the tree after a change done. isnt it possible at all to just
have orginal data and write interface routines for gtk to see my orginal data
as gtkTree ?


These 2 are my basic questions. All the rest of the questions can be derived
from them.


rds