Re: Table object

From:
Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.spamfilter@virtualinfinity.net>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:30:30 -0700
Message-ID:
<er38m.6023$501.5481@newsfe13.iad>
Philipp wrote:

Hello,
I'm looking for a collection which behaves like a two column table
(ordered key - value pairs, key not unique). Is there such a thing
either in the JRE or Apache collections?

Thanks Phil


Map<Key, List<Value>> map;

You can use an commons-collection lazy-map to help with it, but commons
doesn't use generics (AFAIK), so you'll get a warning.

Anyway, if you use a LazyMap, you could do this:

map.get(myKey).add(myValue);

The down-side is that lookups will create empty lists, even if you don't
want it to.

I often use the following instead of a lazy list:

public static <K,V> List<V> getReadableList(Map<K,V> map, K key) {
     final List<V> list = map.get(key);
     if (list == null) { return Collections.emptyList(); }
     return list;
}

public static <K,V> List<V> getWritableList(Map<K,V> map, K key) {
     List<V> list = map.get(key);
     if (list == null) {
        list = new ArrayList<V>();
        mput.put(key, list);
     }
     return list;
}

--
Daniel Pitts' Tech Blog: <http://virtualinfinity.net/wordpress/>

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