Re: Using a lot of Maps

From:

Tom Anderson <twic@urchin.earth.li>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 18:24:10 +0000

Message-ID:

<alpine.DEB.1.10.1011221822210.24975@urchin.earth.li>

On Mon, 22 Nov 2010, ses wrote:

So I find myself using rather a lot of maps in my latest piece of work
to represent nested objects e.g:

HashMap<Integer, HashMap<Integer,String>>

Where for example the first and second integers are attributes and
string is some value that an Integer-Integer combination corresponds
to. I only ever need to really put and get the String value based on
the Integer attributes, but it seems a more effective tree like
structure than using a custom data structure and having to iterate
over it.

My question is, should I be worried about using maps in this manner,
would a custom data structure be better? I think I'm becoming too used
to using them.

That kind of collection-of-collection structure is okay for two or maybe
three levels, but after that, IME, it's usually worth reifying the objects
that are hiding inside it.

Could you give us a bit of an example of your data, and what you're doing
with it?

tom

--
drink beer and forget about gods. -- derslangerman