Creating a drilldown menu in rails

Question

I have a array of strings which look similar to:

"folder1/filea/x1.png", "folder1/fileb/x2.png", "folder2/folder3/filec/x3.png" .....

And my goal is to create a drilldown menu like: http://iwantaneff.in/repo/plugins/menu-nav/drill.down/index.html

In rails I have tried using the group_by method, but had no luck. essentially I need to create a folder structure like

1. folder1
   • filea
     • x1.png
   • fileb
     • x2.png
2. folder2

and so on.....

Any idea on where to start? I am having major difficulty approaching this problem. I have used the split method on each array so I get an array of arrays, but this does not seem to be getting anywhere. I think I need to use recursion to go through sub-trees?

Answer 1

Answer is simple) use recursion for parsing and inserting data

example of parsing =>

   def parse(hash)
      hash.each do |k,v|
        files = v.select{|e| e.size == 1}
        hash[k] = {"files" => files.flatten} unless files.empty?
        dirs = v - files
        unless dirs.empty? 
          dirs = parse(dirs.group_by{|e| e.shift})
          if files.empty?
            hash[k] = dirs  
          else
            hash[k].merge! dirs
          end
        end 
      end
    end

for input

h = {:root =>  ["folder1/filea/x1.png", "folder1/fileb/x2.png","folder1/fileb/folder4/111", "folder2/folder3/filec/x3.png","folder2/folder3/filec/x4.png"].map{|e| e.split("/")}}

parse(h)

output will be

{:root=>{"folder1"=>{"filea"=>{"files"=>["x1.png"]}, "fileb"=>{"files"=>["x2.png"], "folder4"=>{"files"=>["111"]}}}, "folder2"=>{"folder3"=>{"filec"=>{"files"=>["x3.png", "x4.png"]}}}}}