Home/ Questions/Q 510619
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-13T07:07:56+00:00

I’m having a bit of a hard time. Essentially I need a data structure

  • 0

I’m having a bit of a hard time. Essentially I need a data structure that would work a bit like a database. I need to be able to have multiple bits of data for each key and have the possibility of having multiple keys with the same name. Then I need to be able to search that data structure and pull the correct keyword and check it against other possible data. Here is an example:

Keys   |   Name   |  Price

Airplane | Boeing | 10000
Airplane | LearJet | 4000
Airplane | Airbus | 20000
Car | Honda | 500
Car | Ford | 450
Car | Chevy | 600

So I need to be able to specifically be able to search for Airplanes and Airplanes that are Boeing’s. For a lot of reasons I cannot use an actual database, it’d be complete overkill, since I don’t have many records, but I do need to be able to pull these values. I found a multimap implementation in Java but it didn’t allow me to insert multiple keys with the same name nor did it allow me to do search not only keys but keys with a corresponding value.

Anyone have an idea of how this might be implemented?
Thanks

Edit: Okay I looked over all the answers. I for some reason just cannot understand any situation where you need keys to be unique but you are using maps. There are many answers that feature this solution and I take all fault for not being able to understand them.
Ultimately I needed to have multiple unique keys and I know these solutions were workaround for that but I just couldn’t make sense of it.

While it’s far from being a perfect solution, I used Apache’s MultiKey Class and since I only need to pull one possible value it works okay. I appreciate everyone’s effort unfortunately I just couldn’t get it work otherwise. Sorry

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Why not use MultiKey from Apache Commons collections

    http://commons.apache.org/collections/api-3.1/org/apache/commons/collections/keyvalue/MultiKey.html

    // populate map with data mapping key+name to price
Map map = new HashMap();
MultiKey multiKey = new MultiKey(key, name);
map.put(multiKey, price);

// later retireve the price
MultiKey multiKey = new MultiKey(key, name);
<Number> price = (String) map.get(price);
    • 0