MLM Downline Distribution Count

I make my first MLM software and I think I managed to code how to get the points from the downline even though it is a recursive problem I didn't use recursion and I might refactor

Solution 1:

The main problem I see here is that you're essentially trying to do a breadth-first search (you look at all the users who are below the distributor, then look at all of the users below those distributors, etc etc), but each time the while loop loops you're only looking at the users below the last distributor.

If we break down the important parts into something python-ish, you get this:

distributor=self
while distributor.has_downline():
    for person in distributor.downline:
        distributor = person

As you can see, the value of distributor after the first set of downlines are accessed is the last distributor in the user's downline. Then the next time the for loop is run, you're only looking at the last distributor's downline.

Traditionally a tree-walking algorithm is either recursive or loop-based with a stack. Generally you will choose one or the other based on memory constraints. To keep the solution iterative, you'd need to rewrite the above python-ish code like this:

downlinestack = []
distributor=self
downlinestack += distributor.downline
while downlinestack:
    downline = downlinestack.pop()
    for person in downline:
        downlinestack.append(person.downline)