Advice on appropriate datastructure

Question

Hi everyone I've got a bunch of related tables I'm retreiving data from and end result is I end up with a bunch of (keyvalue) pairs for an object. So one object might have: total 10 tax1 2 and another object might have these values: total 20 tax1 4 tax2 3 In the end I want to sum up all the common fields in my returned objects so I've got something like: total 30 tax1 6 tax2 3 And I want to display this final info in a form. The question is what is the best datastructure to store everything in? I thought of a 2-dimensional array but then I end up going through a lot of loops to add everything up later (checking key fields adding up value fields if equal etc). Then I thought maybe an extended hashtable class with the add() method overridden but I'm not sure how to do that. Any suggestions?

Administrator · Answer

Why not just create a dbKey class. The class only contains variables and properties. Using a class like this really makes it no different than using a struct but I prefer this method because I think you have a bit more control in a full class as apposed to a struct. Then again that may just be because I'm still a JAVA programmer at heart.

Administrator · Answer

Well if all you need is the end result you could think about sticking with the hashtable (just one) and updating the sums as you do inserts. When you had an item (like tax1) you would check to see if there was already a key/value pair for it in the hash and if so retrieve the current value add your new number and then update the value in the hash. Otherwise you'd just add new the key/value pair. What I suggest assumes that are you are trying to get at is the end result and that you dont depend on any intermediate values of the items in the hashtable though.