Question

I need help defining what approach to use. I have a SOAP response giving me an xml file. I need to end-up with 3 correlated lists displayed on screen. When you select one item on the first list, the corresponding choices will appear on the second list etc. I am only interested on how to organize efficiently the data after it is extracted from the xml stream. Here’s an xml snippet:

<device>
    <manufacturer>Acer</manufacturer>
    <model>A1</model>
    <platform>Android</platform>
</device>
<device>
    <manufacturer>Acer</manufacturer>
    <model>A1</model>
    <platform>J2ME</platform>
</device>
<device>
    <manufacturer>Acer</manufacturer>
    <model>A2</model>
    <platform>Android</platform>
</device>
<device>
    <manufacturer>Samsung</manufacturer>
    <model>E400</model>
    <platform>Android</platform>
</device>

So, I will have something like manufacturer={“Acer”, “Acer”, “Acer”,”Samsung”}, model={“A1″,”A1”, “A2”, “E400”}, platform={“Android”,”J2ME”,”Android”,”Android”}.

Here comes the fun part: I need to massage the data so that I can use it to display 3 lists. After selecting Android, Acer and Samsung become available. If Acer is selected, then model A1 and A2 are available. All lists need to be sorted. Currently I’m using Sax to parse the data into a vector of objects, containing manufacturer, model, platform fields. All I can think of is a TreeMap like structure. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I do not think that hierarchical structure is what you need here. Because user may select first platform or manufacturer. If he selects first Android you want to show 3 devices. If he selects first Acer he will see 2 devices.

So, my suggesting is the following.

1. create class Device with properties manufacturer, model, platform.
2. create a plain linked list that contains all these devices.

3. Create 2 maps: manufaturerIndex and plarformIndex that look like:
   Map<String, Collection<Device>> manufacturerIndex;

4. Iterate once over the list and populate all indexes maps.

Like this:

for(Device d : devices) {
    Collection<Device> selected = manufacturerIndex.get(d.getManufacturer());
    if (selected == null) {
         selected = new ArrayList<Device>();
         manufactuerIndex.put(d.getManufacturer(), selected);
    }
    selected.add(d);
    // the same for the second index
}

Now you can use the data structure.

manufactuerIndex.get("Nokia") -> returns all Nokia devices.

Pay attention that this data structure is extendable. You can always add as many indexes as you want.