获得文件夹结构层次结构的最佳数据结构？

Question

I am creating an application to organise my files and folders. The files and folder structure would be shown in the application. Say for an example the client would send me the folder structure with files as follows

  a
  |
  |—b— d — a.txt
    |— e — b.txt

1.a/b/d/a.txt

2.a/b/e/b.txt

For the first time i would create folders a,b,d for the second time it would be enough to create folder e alone.

When the input is a/f/g/h/i/j/abc.txt I should know that the maximum folder created in this is a - and I should know that the rest folders are new - and I must be able to create the rest.

Now how I am doing is parse each file level and check for its existence in the table and then iterating. I would like avoid querying the table each time in each level. So, I would like to organise this in a tree hierarchy. What would be the best data structure to maintain this folder structure? And how to parse the tree after tree construction? Say in a binary tree it would have the property that the data at its right would be greater than the root value and the data at the left would be less than the root value. But here i don't have any logic behind this folder tree structure. In this case which tree implementation would suite?

Answer 1

You could have a custom tree where the nodes can have an arbitrary number of children. Something like

class Node {
    public String name;
    public List<Node> children;
}

In this implementation the leaves will have an empty/null list of children.