Binary Tree depth help

[mishy]

I have a list of people with a matching telephone extension number, the people are organised in a hierachy tree with some colleagues at the same level and then some junior colleagues. I have been trying to write code that can find the tree height of any given member but I am unable too. Here is my code so far but the left and right are not working because I have not declared them any where in my code.

//hierarchy rank section 7
  // **Depth** from node to root (bottom up)
  public int rank(Member p1){ 	  
	//to do
    
    int currentDepth, depth;
  
        if (p1 != null) {
            currentDepth++;
             
            // record total depth if current depth is greater than total depth 
            if (currentDepth > depth) {
                depth = currentDepth;
            }
     
            // recursively traverse entire tree
            depth(p1.left);
            depth(p1.right);
             
            // decrement as we traverse up the binary tree
            currentDepth--;
        }
        return depth;
    
	}

[Cg33k]

To get the depth of a BST you need to just count the steps taken to find the target.
Basically just add a counter to the search method of the tree, when done searching that counter is the depth of the searched for member...

[mishy]

My problem is eclipse is highlighting an error on p1.left and p1.right because p1 has not been set as a node but just as a member. What I am trying to achieve with my method is that for any given member you should be able find their rank, with the rank being how many branches down from the head (I hope it makes sense). Do I need to find the node of the member then the p1.left and p1.right will work?

[AlexGraal]

This may not be right:

When I worked with trees for writing a compression program, the "bottom" of my tree was simply another treenode with "null" branches.


AKA, your very bottom member should actually be another tree node, where you set the branches to be null. That way, you can keep going down the tree until you reach a "NULL." It's an easy way to know when to stop.