Looping and deleting all elements

[StefanAlmighty]

Okay so I'm working on a dxGUI system and the GUI's children is stored in tables in the element data. For example if you made an edit box on a window it would be stored in the getElementData(window, "children") which is a table.

In my system children can have children can have children etc, I want a quick system which deletes the every element within the original window. I'm not sure how.

I've started with this:

  
function dxDestroyElement(element) -- destroys an entire tree of elements 
    local children = getElementData(element, "children") 
    if getElementData(element, "children") then 
        for i, v in ipairs(children) do 
            destroyElement(v) 
        end 
    end 
    destroyElement(element) 
end 
  

This only destroys the main element and it's children. The 'grand-children' etc aren't destroyed as it'd be a huge chunk of code. Is there a way of constantly looping through the children destroying each one?

[KariiiM]

function dxDestroyElement(element) -- destroys an entire tree of elements 
    if not isElement (element) then return end  
    local children = getElementData(element, "children") 
    if not children then return end   
        for i, v in ipairs(children) do 
            if isElement (v) then  
                destroyElement(v) 
                v = nil  
            end  
        end 
    end 
    destroyElement(element)    
end 

[Castillo]

Why don't you just use setElementParent? this way, if you delete the parent, the children will be deleted aswell, with no extra code.

[StefanAlmighty]

Solidsnake because of these notes:

Thanks Karim, I'll try that now.

PS: Karim will that work for children of children of children?

[StefanAlmighty]

Didn't destroy all the children of the children elements. I need a loop that loops through every possible child element and destroys them, but not sure how.