Question

I have about 200 categories that are nested. I am currently reading the documention on the C5 generics library. I am not sure if the C5 library is overkill or not. I am looking at converting all my custom algorithms to the C5 implemention.

This is what I need. If a certain category is chosen i need to find its parents, siblings, direct children, and all children.

This is the way I have it set up. To find the:

Parents:
I start from the current location then loop through the list and find the current parent. When I find the parent I loop through the whole list again to find the next parent and so on.

Siblings:
I loop through the whole list and find all the nodes that have the same parent as the choosen node.

direct children:
I loop through the whole list and find all nodes that is a parent of the choosen node.

All Children:
This one took me a while to figure out. But I used recursion to find all children of the choosen node.

Is there a better way to implement something like this?

Answer 1

Why does it have to be collection-based? I would just create class Category with properties Category Parent and IList<Category> Children. That way, finding parent or predecessors is really easy (and fast!), finding children too, siblings are children of parent except the current category, so they are easy too. And finding descendants is trivial recursion.