Question

I have a set of string that I need to store in a set, such as:

id, firstname, lastname, city, country, language

All of the above apply to a single person (represented by the ID)

Now I have 60 – 70 of these (and growing), how could I organize them? I have looked at the NameValueCollection class – and it does exactly what I want (if I only had two fields), but since I have 6 fields, I can’t use it. E.g.:

public NameValueCollection personCollection = new NameValueCollection
    {
        { "harry", "townsend", "london", "UK", "english" },
        { "john", "cowen", "liverpool", "UK", "english" },
        // and so on...
    };

Although this does not work 🙁 Could someone suggest another way of achieving this?

Answer 1

If you absolutely don’t want to create any new classes, you could use a dictionary of lists, keyed by your ID:

IDictionary<string, IList<string>> personCollection =
    new Dictionary<string, IList<string>>
{
    { "1", new [] { "harry", "townsend", "london", "UK", "english" }},
    { "2", new [] { "john", "cowen", "liverpool", "UK", "english" }},
};

…which you could then access using dictionary and list indexers:

Console.WriteLine(personCollection["1"][0]);   // Output: "harry"
Console.WriteLine(personCollection["2"][2]);   // Output: "liverpool"

However, the correct OOP approach would be to define a class with properties for your respective strings:

public class Person
{
    public string Id { get; set; }
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
    public string City { get; set; }
    public string Country { get; set; }
    public string Language { get; set; }

    public Person() { }

    public Person(string id, string firstName, string lastName, 
                  string city, string country, string language)
    {
        this.Id = id;
        this.FirstName = firstName;
        this.LastName = lastName;
        this.City = city;
        this.Country = country;
        this.Language = language;
    }
}

You could then create a list of persons:

IList<Person> persons = new List<Person>()
{
    new Person("1", "harry", "townsend", "london", "UK", "english"),
    new Person("2", "john", "cowen", "liverpool", "UK", "english"),
};