Exporting a GtkSharp TreeView to CSV
I recently had to create some functionality to export a TreeView widget to a CSV file for further analysis. Since I tend to think about generic behavior, I decided to code up a method that would take any arbitrary TreeView and perform the export operation. Luckily, the TreeView widget and the attached TreeModel both contain a lot of functionality for accessing the data and it's presentation. I decided that I wanted the exported CSV file to represent the perspective of the model as currently represented in the TreeView including column visibility and sort order. This led to the trickiest part of the process. Because a CellRenderer can be customized using cell data functions (such as those added by a call to TreeViewColumn.SetCellDataFunc), I had to pull the content to export from the CellRenderer as opposed to pulling directly from the TreeModel. Turns out there's a method to take the TreeIter from a TreeModel and apply it to all the CellRenderers in a given TreeViewColumn. Since I really only care about textual content, I decided to only export those columns that contain CellRendererText renderers.