ExRoseTree :: A Rose Tree and Zipper in Elixir with a slew of navigation primitives.

Documentation

API documentation is available at https://hexdocs.pm/ex_rose_tree.

A Rose Tree with Functional Zipper in Elixir

What's a Rose Tree?

A Rose Tree, also known as a multi-way or m-way tree by some, is a general-purpose, recursively defined data structure where each position can have an an arbitrary value and an arbitrary number of children. Each child is, itself, another Rose Tree.

ExRoseTree is implemented as a very simple struct defstruct ~w(term children)a with an equally simple typespec:

@type t() :: %__MODULE__{
        term: term(),
        children: [t()]
      }

What's it good for?

Practically speaking, a few good use cases for Rose Trees could be:

• outlines
• file systems
• parsing HTML/XML documents
• abstract syntax trees
• decision trees
• data visualization (org charts, family trees, taxonomies, nested menus)

This implementation also comes with a companion ExRoseTree.Zipper data structure, and greatly enhances the usefulness of the standard Rose Tree.

So what's a Zipper?

A Zipper of a given data structure can be thought of as taking the derivative of that data structure. It provides an efficient, context-aware approach to traversing and manipulating the contents of the Rose Tree.

In his foundational paper formalizing the idea, Gerard Huet perhaps describes it best:

The basic idea is simple: the tree is turned inside-out like a returned glove, pointers from the root to the current position being reversed in a path structure. The current location holds both the downward current subtree and the upward path. All navigation and modification primitives operate on the location structure. Going up and down in the structure is analogous to closing and opening a zipper in a piece of clothing, whence the name.

And what's a Zipper of a Rose Tree good for?

In practice, ExRoseTree.Zipper can be used as an effective means of representing everything from a cursor in a text editor to a selected item in a nested sidebar/dropdown menu in a UI which needs to maintain persistent focus. Essentially, anything that has an arbitrary hierarchy and would necessitate or benefit from the capability of being context-aware could be a candidate for a Rose Tree with Zipper.

Installation

If available in Hex, the package can be installed by adding ex_rose_tree to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:ex_rose_tree, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Example Usage

alias ExRoseTree, as: Tree
alias ExRoseTree.Zipper

Tree.new(1)
# %ExRoseTree{term: 1, children: []}

tree = Tree.new(1, [2,3,4,5])
# %ExRoseTree{term: 1, children: [
#   %ExRoseTree{term: 2, children: []},
#   %ExRoseTree{term: 3, children: []},
#   %ExRoseTree{term: 4, children: []},
#   %ExRoseTree{term: 5, children: []},
# ]}

zipper = Zipper.new(tree)
# %ExRoseTree.Zipper{
#   focus: %ExRoseTree{
#     term: 1,
#     children: [
#       %ExRoseTree{term: 2, children: []},
#       %ExRoseTree{term: 3, children: []},
#       %ExRoseTree{term: 4, children: []},
#       %ExRoseTree{term: 5, children: []}
#     ]
#   },
#   prev: [],
#   next: [],
#   path: []
# }

zipper = Zipper.last_child(zipper)
# %ExRoseTree.Zipper{
#   focus: %ExRoseTree{term: 5, children: []},
#   prev: [
#     %ExRoseTree{term: 4, children: []},
#     %ExRoseTree{term: 3, children: []},
#     %ExRoseTree{term: 2, children: []}
#   ],
#   next: [],
#   path: [%ExRoseTree.Zipper.Location{prev: [], term: 1, next: []}]
# }

zipper = Zipper.backward(zipper)
# %ExRoseTree.Zipper{
#   focus: %ExRoseTree{term: 4, children: []},
#   prev: [
#     %ExRoseTree{term: 3, children: []},
#     %ExRoseTree{term: 2, children: []}
#   ],
#   next: [%ExRoseTree{term: 5, children: []}],
#   path: [%ExRoseTree.Zipper.Location{prev: [], term: 1, next: []}]
# }

zipper = Zipper.rewind_map(zipper, &Tree.map_term(&1, fn t -> t * 10 end))
# %ExRoseTree.Zipper{
#   focus: %ExRoseTree{
#     term: 10,
#     children: [
#       %ExRoseTree{term: 2, children: []},
#       %ExRoseTree{term: 3, children: []},
#       %ExRoseTree{term: 40, children: []},
#       %ExRoseTree{term: 5, children: []},
#     ]
#   },
#   prev: [],
#   next: [],
#   path: []
# }

Zipper.to_tree(zipper)
# %ExRoseTree{
#   term: 10,
#   children: [
#     %ExRoseTree{term: 2, children: []},
#     %ExRoseTree{term: 3, children: []},
#     %ExRoseTree{term: 40, children: []},
#     %ExRoseTree{term: 5, children: []}
#   ]
# }

Testing and Disclaimer

While great pains have been taken to provide extensive test coverage--over 800 tests at present, this library is still pre-1.0, so be sure to do your due diligence for your own use case.

To run the test suite:

$ mix deps.get
$ mix test

To run test coverage with excoveralls:

$ mix deps.get
$ mix coveralls

or for HTML output:

$ mix deps.get
$ MIX_ENV=test mix coveralls.html

Contributions, Issues, and Further Development

Additional functionality and work to explore adding include:

• Tree diffing and merging algorithms
• Multiple cursor support (i.e.: multiple, concurrent contexts on a Zipper)
• LiveBook examples
• Visualizations of the many traversal functions
• Improvements to the generators
• Even more unit tests, including property tests
• Performance improvements and benchmarks
• Change tracking and pluggable backends for persistence
• Documentation, guide, and example improvement, clarification, and cohesion

We're open to any and all ideas and thoughtful contribution here, so don't hesitate to pipe in, but please be sure to follow our Code of Conduct. If you find a bug or it doesn't quite meet your needs without feature X, consider opening an issue in the issues tracker.

Thanks

A big thanks to @zwilias and his Elm package elm-rosetree for the initial inspiration in building this library.

Continued thanks to @odoood for ongoing help reviewing code and improving documentation.

Copyright and License

Copyright (c) 2022-present, Paraclade, LLC.

ExRoseTree source code is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.