Treechildren

Treechildren is a term used in computer science and software libraries to refer to the collection of child nodes attached to a single parent within a tree data structure. The treechildren of a node represents all nodes that are directly descended from that node, and together they define the node’s immediate branching. In typical implementations, the treechildren container is ordered and may support dynamic updates, such as adding or removing children, iterating over the children, or querying their properties. Each child in a tree has exactly one parent, and the structure as a whole forms a hierarchy without cycles.

In practice, treechildren are often implemented as a list, array, or specialized container object that provides utilities for traversal, insertion, deletion, and search. Common operations include counting the number of children, accessing a child by index, and applying a function to each child (for example, during tree traversal algorithms like depth-first or breadth-first search). The concept of treechildren is central to many data structures, including file systems, organization charts, and parse trees.

In some UI frameworks, particularly Mozilla’s XUL, the term treechildren refers to a concrete element that holds the rows of a tree widget. In that context, treechildren serves as the container for the visible child rows and can be manipulated to add or remove items in the tree view.

See also: tree (data structure), node (data structure), children (property), tree item.