The topic of generating org charts on an XPage came up recently, and I decided to try my hand at making a pretty basic one using a technique similar to my re-use of Outline design elements from the other week. Not only are the generated hierarchies potentially useful, but it ended up providing a much cleaner example of how to recursively generate an Extension-Library tree.

To get started, I mocked up some basic data: I created a standard Domino directory database and created users with unique ShortName values and the ShortName of their immediate boss in the Manager field, with anyone at the top level having a blank field. Then, because I'm too lazy to look through the existing views to see if one does it, I created a "Managers" view that simply shows Person documents categorized by their Manager field (with a bit of computation to convert self-referential documents to top-level). You can see the live result in the test database, along with applicable code excerpts:

http://frostillic.us/namestest.nsf

The algorithm itself provides a nice exercise in recursion:

1. Get a list of all top-level managers
2. For each of those names:
   1. Find their child count to determine whether or not they're a leaf
   2. Create an outline entry with their name
   3. For each child entry, repeat this process

This could potentially be modified to query an LDAP server instead of reading a view directly, which would make it more flexible (and complicated), and the output could be modified or re-used for other visual representations, as needed.

The absolute most important thing when doing recursion, though, is to make sure you listen to music with an appropriately-nerdy title, such as: