Question

I am building an application which allows restaurant guests to order food and send to server.

What i have considered is to

1) create a class Order.java class

public class Order
{

private Intger  tableId;
private Integer restaurantId;
private Integer foodId;
private Integer foodQuantity;

getter and setters
}

2) This class object will be populated with guests order and an ArrayList of objects of the class will be sent to server as Gson String.

Now if an order consist of some 7 items, Then the arraylist will have 7 objects, but tableId and restaurantId will be same 7 times.

can you suggest a better design where in I can associate restaurantId and tableId with the entire arraylist.

Thanks.

Answer 1

There is no right solution, it would depend on your needs, one possible solution would be something like:

public class Order {

    private int tableId;
    private int restaurant;
    private List<OrderItem> items;

    // setters and getters

}

public class OrderItem {

    private int itemId; // foodId
    private int quatity; // foodQuantity

    // setters and getters

}

But if you were in a situation that the information comes not normalized, like you suggested (in which tableId is repeated for every single food ordered), I would consider to implement a normalization process that will return a structure with the classes I draft above. But if you are implementing it, please consider to make it as normalized as possible.