I have an app that loads records from a binary log file and displays them in a virtual TListView. There are potentially millions of records in a file, and the display can be filtered by the user, so I do not load all of the records in memory at one time, and the ListView item indexes are not a 1-to-1 relation with the file record offsets (List item 1 may be file record 100, for instance). I use the ListView's OnDataHint event to load records for just the items the ListView is actually interested in. As the user scrolls around, the range specified by OnDataHint changes, allowing me to free records that are not in the new range, and allocate new records as needed.

This works fine, speed is tolerable, and the memory footprint is very low.

I am currently evaluating TVirtualStringTree as a replacement for the TListView, mainly because I want to add the ability to expand/collapse records that span multiple lines (I can fudge it with the TListView by incrementing/decrementing the item count dynamically, but this is not as straight forward as using a real tree).

For the most part, I have been able to port the TListView logic and have everything work as I need. I notice that TVirtualStringTree's virtual paradigm is vastly different, though. It does not have the same kind of OnDataHint functionality that TListView does (I can use the OnScroll event to fake it, which allows my memory buffer logic to continue working), and I can use the OnInitializeNode event to associate nodes with records that are allocated.

However, once a tree node is initialized, it sees that it remains initialized for the lifetime of the tree. That is not good for me. As the user scrolls around and I remove records from memory, I need to reset those non-visual nodes without removing them from the tree completely, or losing their expand/collapse states. When the user scrolls them back into view, I can re-allocate the records and re-initialize the nodes. Basically, I want to make TVirtualStringTree act as much like TListView as possible, as far as its virtualization is concerned.

I have seen that TVirtualStringTree has a ResetNode() method, but I encounter various errors whenever I try to use it. I must be using it wrong. I also thought of just storing a data pointer inside each node to my record buffers, and I allocate and free memory, update those pointers accordingly. The end effect does not work so well, either.

Worse, my largest test log file has ~5 million records in it. If I initialize the TVirtualStringTree with that many nodes at one time (when the log display is unfiltered), the tree's internal overhead for its nodes takes up a whopping 260MB of memory (without any records being allocated yet). Whereas with the TListView, loading the same log file and all the memory logic behind it, I can get away with using just a few MBs.

Any ideas?