Question

I need to store boolean data in Windows Azure. I want to make the space these take up as small as possible. What I have is about fifteen fields with values that are true of false.

field_1 = true;
field_2 = true;
field_a = false;
field_xx = true;

I had an idea that I could take these, convert the true and false to 1s and 0s and then store as a string something like 1101. Is there a simple way that I could do this coding and then uncode when getting the data out? Note that the field names are all different and so I can’t use a fancy for loop to go through field names.

Answer 1

int bits = (field_1 ? 1 : 0) | (field_2 ? 2 : 0) | (field_3 ? 4 : 0) | (field_4 ? 8 : 0) | ...

field_1 = (bits & 1) != 0;
field_2 = (bits & 2) != 0;
field_3 = (bits & 4) != 0;
field_4 = (bits & 8) != 0;
...