so to get things to show up as I wanted I had to add a "children" property to my EmployeeGroup (didn't see that anywhere in the documentation, but I noticed the Adobe examples have "children" properties).
So I added this in the EmployeeGroup: <pre> public function get children():ArrayCollection { var kids:ArrayCollection = new ArrayCollection(); for (var i:int=0; i < groups.length; i++) { kids.addItem(groups[i]); } for (var i:int=0; i < employees.length; i++) { kids.addItem(employees[i]); } return kids; } </pre> Obviously it can be more efficient, but it works..which is the start!