Hi @jessime.kirk, welcome to the forum!
I had a look at your app. You are correct that the slow performance in the IDE is due to the very long and nested repeating panels. Sure enough, if you delete the repeating panel on the main page, the app is zippy again.
I know that others here (including myself) have worked with tree-like design patterns and so it should be absolutely possible to do what you want to do and have a fast IDE.
My initial sense is that your tree design could be done without repeating panels. Rather, you can design a general “child node” that is used for nesting and build it programmatically when needed (i.e., when there is a click event, add the nested component).
For example:
Create a form that holds a single node’s design information only (not its content per se). See the image below. Let’s call this form “child node” for the sake of this example. You can see that it has a right-justified container at the bottom and this is used to hold additional nested elements (i.e., other instances of itself).
The tree design could follow this pattern:
- main node (column panel, or linear panel)
- child node 1 added to main node’s container
- child node 2 added to child node 1’s container
- child node 3 added to child node 2’s container
- and so on…
- child node 3 added to child node 2’s container
- child node 2 added to child node 1’s container
- child node 1 added to main node’s container
You can end up with something like this, which is very zippy and doesn’t require a jam-packed IDE:
Of course you will have to control the content that is passed to each node each node but that is certainly possible to determine since you know where the user clicks.
I would suggest searching the forum for “tree-like patterns” and perhaps giving the above approach a try to see if it works for you.