object array or collection

Question

Basic array/ collections question.
Say I want my users to be able to store multiple movie lists with their account. So the user might create and save a "Bob's Comedies" list and a "Bob's Classics" list etc. that he's built from a master list of movies.
So I've got a MoviesList class, of which there will be multiple instances per user, and the movielist class will contain one or more movie class objects.

At some point, the user will want to view his movielist with all his movies and their metadata.
When this is instantiated, how do I associate the movies with the list? Do I have a collection of movies within the movielist class? Or do I have an array of movies within the movielist class? Or does my movielist class contain nothing more than an array of indexes to the movies?

Sam Hobbs · Answer

It depends on how you will store the data. Also I think you are describing genre for movies. There are other ways to categorize movies and I think it is worthwhile analyzing and designing what you want to do to categorize movies. There are sites such as imdb.com that should help you deciding what you want to do. You could let the individual user decide what categories they want but I think most people would prefer to have a more standard design. Or you could do both; standard categories and individual categories. Assuming you will use the same genres used by other sites you could have a table of genres and/or other categories. So you would have at least the following tables: Movie Category User I think you would need two more tables; one that lists the categories of a movie and another that lists the movies for a user. You could use a SQL database for the data instead of arrays. The .Net has extensive support of databases and database tables so most of what you would do can be done efficiently using a database and database tables.

Jaish Mathews · Answer

Hi You need to try with custom collection class. This custom class needs to bind with specific user rofile class. It's something like below. public class Movie { public string MovieName { get ; set ; } public string MovieType { get ; set ; } } public class MoviesCollection : CollectionBase { public IList GetList { get { return List; } } public void Add( Movie movie) { List.Add(movie); } } public class UserProfile { public MoviesCollection UserCollectionType { get ; set ; } } public class Client { public void FillMovieList() { //User1 Movie user1Movies = null ; UserProfile user1 = new UserProfile (); user1.UserCollectionType = new MoviesCollection (); user1Movies = new Movie (); user1Movies.MovieType = Comody ; user1Movies.MovieName = Some Comody ; user1.UserCollectionType.Add( user1Movies); user1Movies = new Movie (); user1Movies.MovieType = Horror ; user1Movies.MovieName = Some Horror ; user1.UserCollectionType.Add(user1Movies); //User2 Movie user2Movies = null ; UserProfile user2 = new UserProfile (); user2.UserCollectionType = new MoviesCollection (); user2Movies = new Movie (); user2Movies.MovieType = Family ; user2Movies.MovieName = Some Family ; user2.UserCollectionType.Add(user2Movies); user2Movies = new Movie (); user2Movies.MovieType = War ; user2Movies.MovieName = Some War ; user2.UserCollectionType.Add(user2Movies); //User1 seeing his collection foreach ( Movie movie in user1.UserCollectionType.GetList) { Console .WriteLine(movie.MovieName); Console .WriteLine(movie.MovieType); } foreach ( Movie movie in user2.UserCollectionType.GetList) { Console .WriteLine(movie.MovieName); Console .WriteLine(movie.MovieType); } //LIKE THAT EACH USER CAN ADD THEIR OWN }