Question

Basic question from somebody coming from structured into object programming… hoping not to be too basic.

I want to have a large array of data that is been shared by different classes inside my application.
What’s the best practice to do this?
Is this correct?

public class LargeData {
    private static long[] myData;
    private static final int MAX = 100000;

    public LargeData() {
        myData = new long[MAX];
        // ... initialize
    }

    public long getData(int x) {
    // ... do whatever and return a long
    }
}

And if this is correct, how is the correct way to access this data from any of my classes? Should I make a

LargeData ld = new LargeData();

inside every single class that wants to access to myData?

Thank you and sorry for being too easy… 🙂

Answer 1

Everytime you call

LargeData ld = new LargeData();

in your code, you will be effectively calling

myData = new long[MAX];

which is wrong.

What you can do is:

public class LargeData {

    private static final int MAX = 100000;
    public static long[] myData = new long[MAX];
}

and access it as LargeData.myData from anywhere.