Data trees and C# in Grasshopper

Understanding how Grasshopper handles data is crucial for taking full advantage of GH’s capabilities. For collections of data, they can either be in the form of lists or trees.

A list is a collection of items of data, in a particular order, but with no hierarchical structure. Here is a list of numbers:

The component in the top-right is the param viewer. Double click it to see this:

The ‘N’ denotes a list with N items. A list can be thought of as a tree with a single branch {0}. So here, we are looking at a single list, with address {0}, containing 5 items.

A tree is any data structure in GH with multiple branches. In other words, it’s a data structure with multiple lists. Each list has its own address.

Now, let’s make a grid of points. We can do this with our list of numbers and the ‘construct point’ component.

Here, we have cleverly grafted the Y input to coerce Grasshopper into giving us 25 points for our list of 5 numbers. But the output looks a little different. Instead of a list of 25 points, we have 5 groups of 5 points each.

What’s happened here is that Grasshopper has created 5 branches. Each branch contains a list of 5 points. Each branch has its own address {0} to {4}, shown in the panel.

We can verify this using the param viewer.

Trees in C#

Trees can be created and manipulated in C# components too. When we add data to a tree in C#, we need two pieces of information:

• The data we are saving, such as a Point3d or an integer
• The path we are saving to

The path is declared as a list of numbers denoting the sequence of the branches needed to access the list we are interested in. As some examples:

DataTree<Point3d> myTree = new DataTree<Point3d>();
GH_Path pth = new GH_Path(2);
myTree.Add(P, pth);

point P will be written to the list at the end of branch 2.

GH_Path pth = new GH_Path(i,j)

point P will go down branch i, then be added to the list at the end of branch j

Setting up a tree

You can either add to a tree on the fly – if you know that the data in the tree will be in the same order that you’ll be adding to it. But a more flexible way is to create a blank tree of the size you want, and then edit the values later.

Setting up a tree called boolTree (I am creating a tree based upon another tree called pts):

//declare tree
DataTree<bool> boolTree = new DataTree<bool>();
//set up tree
 for(int i = 0; i < pts.BranchCount;i++)
 {
   GH_Path pth = new GH_Path(i);
   for (int j = 0; j < pts.Branch(0).Count;j++)
   {
     boolTree.Add(false, pth);
   }
 }

This has now created a tree filled with ‘false’.

Editing values in the tree

boolTree.Branch(1,2)[5] = true;

This edits the 5th value of the list at the end of branch 1, sub-branch 2 to ‘true’.