Clinton Roy writes:

i'm using the dtml-tree tag and generating it's contents via external methods. Unfortunately child lookups are quite slow, as well as the icon choosing machinery; is there any way to cache the tree node objects that my external method creates? The tree tag itself does not cache.

You could implement your own cache in your external methods. We extended the tree tag with a "has_branches" argument. If present, it should be a method that tells for the current object whether it has branches (aka children). This reduced the number of database accesses (where our tree data really lives) by an order of magnitude. In principle, I could give you (or the community) a patch for "has_branches". Unfortunately, we extended the tree tag quite drastically (configurable icons, "has_branches", "input type=image" instead of "a href" tags for tree operations). Thus, the "has_branches" extension comes embedded in a big patch that may not be easy to understand. Dieter