Question

I’m just starting to learn c# and I’m having trouble with arrays. The array I want will be multidimensional, but I’m not sure of the proper way to set it up. There will be a total of three dimensions in this array and if it were printed out it would look similar to this:

1, 23, 6.4
1, 29, 1.0
1,  3, 8.68
1, 12, 0.001
1, -5, 0
2, 83, -5
2,  5, 14
2, 19, -12.5
2, 62, 8
2, 81, 1
3,  0, 1.4
3, 11, 1.7848
3, 55, 64.4
3, 82, 23
3,  6, 73.4

Dimension 1 will have a variable number of sets (would be pulled from a database)
Dimension 2 will always have 5 sets
Dimension 3 will always have 1 set

Any help would be appreciated.

[UPDATE]

I was in a hurry when I originally posted this so I didn’t have time to explain fully what this will be used for. Here is some additional information…

Each day people sort through boxes of parts and take a measurement of the parts. Each box has 5 parts that need to be measured.

B1 -> P1:M, P2:M, P3:M, P4:M, P5:M
B2 -> P1:M, P2:M, P3:M, P4:M, P5:M
B3 -> P1:M, P2:M, P3:M, P4:M, P5:M
.
.
.
Bn -> P1:M, P2:M, P3:M, P4:M, P5:M

Where “B” is the information on the box (box serial_no), “P” is the information about each part (part_no), and “M” is the measurement of each part. There will always be 5 parts in a box and we will take only one measurement on each part, but there will be a variable amount of boxes.

Before I posted I had already done research on arrays ( [] ), multidimensional arrays ( [,] ), jagged arrays ( [][] ), lists and a combination of all of them. I know with arrays you have to specify the size of each dimension whereas with lists you can add more to them.

Is there a way I could combine a 2D (which would hold the measurement information for each part) and a list (which would hold the list of boxes)?

The box information will be int, the part information will be int, but the measurement will be double.

Answer 1

This is what I ended up doing:

List<PartMeasurements> N = new List<PartMeasurements>();

N.Add(new PartMeasurements(24, new double[,] { {54, -0.146}, {9, 1.2}, {16, 0.097}, {15, 1}, {64, -0.9774} }));
N.Add(new PartMeasurements(4, new double[,] { {32, 0.76}, {45, 1.472}, {18, 0.005}, {52, 1.1}, {31, -0.1} }));
N.Add(new PartMeasurements(73, new double[,] { {81, 1.56}, {24, 1.34}, {9, 0.2}, {2, 0.6}, {55, -0.5} }));

public class PartMeasurements
{
    public int BoxSerial_No;
    public double[,] partNumber_and_Measurement = new double[5, 1];

    public Numbers(int BoxSerial_No, double[,] partNumber_and_Measurement)
    {
        this.BoxSerial_No = BoxSerial_No;
        this.partNumber_and_Measurement = partNumber_and_Measurement;
    }
}

If I want to see what is in “N” I can do this:

foreach(var x in N)
{
     Console.Write("{0}\t", x.BoxSerial_No);
     for (int y = 0; y < x.partNumber_and_Measurement.GetLength(0); y++)
     {
        Console.Write("{0} ", x.partNumber_and_Measurement[y, 0]);
        Console.Write("{0} ", x.partNumber_and_Measurement[y, 1]);
     }
 }