Question

I’m trying to build a contact manager. I have a datastructure in mind that has a couple of properties:

• it is tree like, meaning that each piece of information can be split up into subpieces (each node has children). For example a field called address may consist out of street, town, postal code, etc subfields.

• nodes do not have to be unique, for instance several nodes of the email field should be able to coexist next to each other (at the same level)

I would like to be able to explore the tree using a path-like manner, e.g. access nodes by path: address.street or name.first. Accessing nodes whose key is present more than once could be done like email[2].

so a tree could look like:

contact
   ↳ name
        ↳ first      "foo"
        ↳ last       "von bar"
   ↳ email           "[e-mail]"
   ↳ email           "[e-mail]"
   ↳ address
           ↳ street  "foostreet 42"
           ↳ town    "barstadt"
           ↳ zip     "04229"
           ↳ country "footopia"
   ↳ address
           ↳ street  "barton alley 11"
           ↳ town    "foostadt"
           ↳ zip     "998877"
           ↳ country "alcabaz"

what kind of tree is this? I’ve tried using the Boost’s property_tree but found it hard to implement the fact that address should be split at high level (Boost’s standard method would put the street, town, … nodes in one address).

Any ideas are welcome.

Answer 1

what kind of tree is this?

It’s a tree 😉

You can use JSON and the Jackson Lib for modelise your tree :

http://www.mkyong.com/java/jackson-tree-model-example/