Question

I have a jagged dictionary:

 Dictionary<string, Dictionary<int, Dictionary<string, string>>> tierOptions = new Dictionary<string, Dictionary<int, Dictionary<string, string>>>();

Later on, I have code that sets one of those values in the array:

 tierOptions[optionID][npID]["tName"] = cboTier.Text;

The problem is that when it runs through this portion of code, all “tName” elements are set to cboTier.Text instead of just the one element.

For instance if optionID was 1 and npID was 8, and I had these three:

 tierOptions[1][8]["tName"]
 tierOptions[2][8]["tName"]
 tierOptions[3][8]["tName"]

That particular line of code would set all three, instead of just tierOptions[1][8][“tName”]

Any idea why it is doing this? Thanks!

Answer 1

It sounds simply like you have used the same dictionary instance in several “dimensions” (your terminology). Since this is a reference, they are all shared (there is no automatic clone-into-isolated-copies here).

When filling the data, take care to use isolated dictionary instances when the data should be separate.