I received an excellent comment by ‘Chris Rogers’ on my earlier post Implementation of a Tree Structure in PHP. He commented to the fact that the iterator does not work if the child was created prior to the parent. Excellent catch!

To that end I have modified the class, specifically the iterator’s ‘createNode’ method which takes care of this fact. The final code can be found on Github: tree-php

/**
 * JTreeRecursiveIterator
 *
 * To use a recursive iterator you have to extend of the RecursiveIteratorIterator
 * As an example I have built an unordered list
 * For detailed information on please see RecursiveIteratorIterator
 * http://us.php.net/manual/en/class.recursiveiteratoriterator.php
 *
 * @package   JTree
 * @author Jayesh Wadhwani
 * @copyright Jayesh Wadhwani
 * @license  GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE 3.0
 * @version 1.0 2011
 */
class JTreeRecursiveIterator extends RecursiveIteratorIterator {
   /**
   * @var _jTree the JTree object
   */
	private $_jTree;
   /**
   * @var _str string with ul/li string
   */
	private $_str;

	/**
	 * JTreeRecursiveIterator::__construct()
	 *
	 * @param mixed $jt - the tree object
	 * @param mixed $iterator - the tree iterator
	 * @param mixed $mode
	 * @param integer $flags
	 * @return
	 */
	public function __construct(JTree $jt, $iterator, $mode = RecursiveIteratorIterator::LEAVES_ONLY, $flags = 0) {

		parent::__construct($iterator, $mode, $flags);
		$this->_jTree = $jt;
		$this->_str = "<ul>\n";
	}

	/**
	 * JTreeRecursiveIterator::endChildren()
	 * Called when end recursing one level.(See manual)
	 * @return void
	 */
	public function endChildren() {
		parent::endChildren();
		$this->_str .= "</ul></li>\n";
	}

	/**
	 * JTreeRecursiveIterator::callHasChildren()
	 * Called for each element to test whether it has children. (See Manual)
    *
	 * @return mixed
	 */
	public function callHasChildren() {
		$ret = parent::callHasChildren();
		$value = $this->current()->getValue();

		if($ret === true) {
			$this->_str .= "<li>{$value}<ul>\n";
		} else {
			$this->_str .= "<li>{$value}</li>\n";
		}
		return $ret;
	}

	/**
	 * JTreeRecursiveIterator::__destruct()
	 * On destruction end the list and display.
	 * @return void
	 */
	public function __destruct() {
		$this->_str .= "</ul>\n";
      echo $this->_str;
	}

}

Now if you were to re-arrange the array like so where I have made ‘Fires'(id=5) as a child of Hurricanes(id=9)

$categories = array();
$categories[] = array('id' => 1, 'weather_condition' => 'weather', 'parent_id' => 9999);
$categories[] = array('id' => 2, 'weather_condition' => 'Earthquakes', 'parent_id' => 1);
$categories[] = array('id' => 3, 'weather_condition' => 'Major', 'parent_id' => 2);
$categories[] = array('id' => 4, 'weather_condition' => 'Minor', 'parent_id' => 2);
$categories[] = array('id' => 5, 'weather_condition' => 'Fires', 'parent_id' => 9);
$categories[] = array('id' => 6, 'weather_condition' => 'Rain', 'parent_id' => 1);
$categories[] = array('id' => 7, 'weather_condition' => 'Flooding', 'parent_id' => 6);
$categories[] = array('id' => 8, 'weather_condition' => 'Washout', 'parent_id' => 6);
$categories[] = array('id' => 9, 'weather_condition' => 'Hurricanes', 'parent_id' => 1);

And run it

//create a new tree object
$jt = new JTree();

//iterate building the tree
foreach($categories as $category) {
   $uid = $jt->createNode($category['weather_condition'],$category['id'], $category['parent_id']);
}

//update: removed third variable. Use defaults 
$it = new JTreeRecursiveIterator($jt, new JTreeIterator($jt->getTree()));

//iterate to create the ul list
foreach($it as $k => $v) {}

Note that I have removed addChild. It is included in createNode.

The result being:

• weather
  • Earthquakes
    • Major
    • Minor
  • Rain
    • Flooding
    • Washout
  • Hurricanes
    • Fires

Many thanks to Chris for pointing this out.

Happy computing!