Re: Concurrent bidirectional one-to-many map?

From:
Sebastian <sebastian@undisclosed.invalid>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Sat, 07 May 2011 11:43:38 +0200
Message-ID:
<iq348b$iv1$1@news.albasani.net>
Am 06.05.2011 22:45, schrieb markspace:

On 5/6/2011 1:07 PM, Sebastian wrote:

Does anyone know of a concurrent bidirectional one-to-many
map implementation?

By bidirectional I mean that I can lookup keys by values, by
one-to-many I mean that the value end of the map is a list or
set, and by concurrent I mean that I do not need to synchronize
externally and get performance comparable to that of
java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentHashMap in both directions.

If this beast doesn't exist, how would I go about inventing it?
I must say that I am by no means any sort of concurrency guru...

-- Sebastian


Can you just put both keys and values in as the key? Something like:

Map<Key,Key> myMap = new ConcurrentHashMap();
// add key k and value v
Key holder = new Key( k, v, KEY );
myMap.put( holder, holder );
holder = new Key( v, k, VALUE )
myMap.put( holder, holder );
...

public class Key<K,V> {
public enum KeyValue {KEY,VALUE};
private k key;
private V value;
private KeyValue keyOrValue;

public Key( K key, V value, KeyValue keyOrValue ) {
this.key = key;
this.value = value;
this.keyOrValue = keyOrValue;
}
// must also override hashcode and equals...
}

This way when you add something, it gets added as both key and value.
You might want to override "put" to do that automatically. When you look
up either a key or a value, you'll find both.

There may be better ways of doing this, it's just the first thing that I
thought of. Also the code above is meant more as a sketch than a
rigorous code example.


Thanks for the idea. I do not yet see how to deal with the
one-to-many aspect of my problem.

To give an example, I'm trying to solve a problem like this:
Associate tasks with workspaces, where a workspace may hold many
tasks,but a task may be associate with at most one workspace.

Idea:

    private ConcurrentMap<Item, Workspace> wsMap =
              new ConcurrentHashMap<Item, Workspace>();

     public boolean isAssigned( Item item ) {
         return wsMap.containsKey( item );
     }

     public void assign( Item item, Workspace ws ) {
         wsMap.putIfAbsent( item, ws );
         if( !ws.equals( wsMap.get( item) ) ) {
            throw new NotAssignableException();
         }
     }

Now I want to be able to close a workspace, releasing all tasks
to be assignable again to other workspaces.

     public void closeWorkspace( Workspace ws ) {
       // how do this efficiently? iterate over all
       // entries (holding a write lock) and remove it
       // when the value equals ws?
     }

-- Sebastian

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