best practice Treeview populating from differents kinds of objects - treeview

Question

I would like to populate a Treeview.
Here is what I have in DB :
table : Box
BoxID
BoxName
table Book :
BookID
BookName
BoxID (fk Box.BoxID)
table Chapter:
ChapterID
ChapterName
BookID (fk Book.BookID)
As you may know a treeview is made up of treenode object.
A treenode object have a text property and a tag property.
The "text" property is the text that it's display on the screen for this node and the "tag" is an "hidden" value (usually uses to identify a node)
So in my case; the fields ending with ID will be used in the "tag" property and the fields ending with Name will be used in the "text" property
example :
so for a book; I will use the BookID field for the "tag" property and BookName field for the "text" property
note : I use a dbml so I have a Book object, Box object and Chapter object and I use linq to get them from the db.
So my question is; what is the best practice to build this tree?
I have a solution but it's really ugly because it looks like I'm duplicating the code.
The problem is that the values I need to extract for the text and tag properties are identified by differents fields name in the db
So for the book level, I need to get the BookID field to populate the tag property of my node; for the box level, I need to get the BoxID field to populate the tag property , ....
How can I make a kind of generic way to do it ?
I hope I made myself clear enough, don't hesitate to ask me questions :)
Thx in advance

Answer 1

Here is what I have for the moment
I get the list of box with a linq (dbml) request.
List<Box> MyListofBox = getMyListofBox();
Treenode tnBox = null;
Treenode tnBook =null;
foreach(Box b in MyListofBox )
{
tnBox = new TreeNode();
tnBox.tag = b.BoxID;
tnBox.text = b.BoxName;
List<Book> MyListofBook = getMyListofBookByBoxID(b.BoxID)
foreach(Book boo in MyListofBook )
{
tnBook = new TreeNode();
tnBook.tag = boo.BookID;
tnBook.text = boo.BookName;
tnBox.nodes.add(tnBook);
}
mytreeview.nodes.add(tnBox);
}
but of course I don't like this solution...
do you have a better way ?

Answer 2

I would extract the you need from the database in the form of a struct, possibly via the anonnoumous type that has been added to C# together with linq. Then I would populate insert this data into the place in the tree.
From what I get, you are trying to get each property separately, which will not work so well, because then you will have to make a call to the database for each separate property, which is very wasteful.
Addition based on what you have added
I do not believe the code can be more compact - the names you call are similar, but not the same and the way you do it was what I was trying to explain earlier.

Answer 3

You could
Define an key/value interface that both Box and Book implement
Define a delegate that returns a TreeNode and create delegate methods that accept Box and Book
However, I think the code is fine as written. Sometimes you just have to code it and there's little point in further abstracting or optimizing it.
The only issue I see in the code is that you're making a database call in a loop. Whether or not that's a problem depends on the application.