[💡 Feature-Request]: Add option to remove all child nodes of a parent

[snoozbuster]

Given you have two nodes such as:

[
  { id: 'parent' },
  { id: 'child', parentNode: 'parent' }
]

If you select parent and delete it using Backspace (or whatever your deleteKeyCode is configured to), then child will be deleted. However, programmatically calling removeNodes(['parent'], true) does not remove child, it leaves it in the graph. In this second case, the child node has a parentNode property still refers to a node which now no longer exists - this also, surprisingly, does not trigger any errors or anything.

The root cause of this is because the code responsible for hunting down child nodes and adding them to the remove set actually lives in Pane.vue, not in removeNodes as I'd have guessed. Is there some reason for these two to act differently? I would have expected that internally, Pane would basically just be calling removeNodes(selectedNodes, true) (or something very similar). Is this something that can be changed (moved into removeNodes)? To fix this in my application, which supports deleting nodes with either the deleteKeyCode or an explicit delete button, I will have to write some code which explicitly goes and cleans up child nodes, just for the explicit delete case - which not only feels messy and means more code is necessary, but is actually somewhat of a challenge in my particular case.

[bcakmakoglu]

Changing the current behavior of removeNodes to automatically include children would be a breaking change, so for now that won't be happening.
I might add another flag to have this feature, that would be possible - I'll have to think about that.

[bcakmakoglu]

Aren't these usually just thrown as warnings in the console? 😄
They shouldn't interrupt any logic.

The issue with removing children, which I see atm, is what if a child that is being removed is also a parent of another node?
Do we loop through all of these deleting all nodes that were related/associated with the initial parent node that was deleted?

Not 100% sure on this detail tbh 🤔

[bcakmakoglu]

Try out 1.22.0 - I added a third argument to the removeNodes function which will recursively remove all child nodes of a node, meaning if a child is a parent of another node, those children will also be removed as to not leave any "orphans" on the graph.

[snoozbuster]

Aren't these usually just thrown as warnings in the console?

I have the @error event hooked to Sentry/console.error because generally speaking I would like to avoid errors on the whole, and my assumption is that any errors that the library would emit would be issues where I am using the library incorrectly (and thus, bugs in my code that I would like to fix).

The issue with removing children, which I see atm, is what if a child that is being removed is also a parent of another node?
Do we loop through all of these deleting all nodes that were related/associated with the initial parent node that was deleted?

What does View.vue do if you backspace a node? I would assume that it does this, yeah. This thread is really mostly about pointing out two things:

• the inconsistency in how View.vue handles deletes with Backspace vs how removeNodes handles deletes
• the fact that removeNodes can produce a graph state which is invalid and would otherwise be prevented or warned about (such as if you tried to add a child node without a parent)

[bcakmakoglu]

Did you test the new arg yet and was it useful? 😄

[snoozbuster]

I haven't yet, I had some issues when trying to upgrade to the latest version and had to move on before I could resolve them.