Re: single-value map?

From:
Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Sun, 01 Oct 2006 18:57:06 GMT
Message-ID:
<6cUTg.3787$Y24.2147@newsread4.news.pas.earthlink.net>
Paul wrote:

I need to store info where all elements are of the form
ID (an int) --> (ObjType1, ObjType2)
The question is, is there a way of storing O1 and O2 in some kind of an
entrySet instead of using a full-blown map?
That is, instead of doing
Map<Integer, Map<ObjType1, ObjType2>> myMap = new HashMap<Integer,
Map<ObjType1, ObjType2>>();
can I somehow instantiate a new Entry object and store that instead of
an entire map (i.e. Map<Integer, Map.Entry<ObjType1, ObjType2>>)?
The only alternative I see to storing a separate map with each
int-->object pair entry, is making the overall structure to be
Map<Integer, Object[]> but then I'd need to cast the objects out of the
Object[] each time I use them.

If those ARE the only two options I have, which one is faster, casting
every time, or storing each elements pair as a separate Map?

Thanks!


I would not try to use Map.Entry, because that is intended to represent
a key-value pair in a map. The names are all wrong for what you want. In
any case it is only an interface, so you would have to define your own
class implementing it.

Instead, I would declare my own class, probably a private nested class
inside a class that is responsible for the whole data structure. That
way, you can pick meaningful names instead of getKey etc.

private class MyPair{
ObjType1 obj1;
ObjType2 obj2;
....
}

and declare the Map as

Map<Integer, MyPair> myMap = new HashMap<Integer, MyPair>();

only with better identifiers.

Patricia

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