Question

My piece of code will take a Patient object, and loop through an array which stores patient object and if it matches, it will print out the message on the if statement which is all good. But If the patient is not there, I believe the else segment will print out everytime the patient is not in the waitinglist array. What I’m trying to accomplish is to make the “your patient is not on the waiting list” print once if it’s not in the array? Any idea how to do this? I tried to think about a way to do this, but I believe there is a simple solution that my brain cannot just figure out.

public int findWaitingPosition (Patient patient)
{
    for (int i=0 ; i <= waitingList.length-1 ; i++)
    {
        if (waitingList[i].equals(patient))
        {
            System.out.println ("The patient is on waiting list: " + i+1);
        }
        else
        {
            System.out.println ("Your patient is not on the waiting list");
        }

    }

Answer 1

I would use a temporary variable. Also it looks like your method is supposed to return the position of the patient in the array. In this snippet -1 means not found.

public int findWaitingPosition (Patient patient)
{
    int position = -1;
    for (int i=0 ; i <= waitingList.length-1 ; i++)
    {
        if (waitingList[i].equals(patient))
        {
            position = i;
            break;
        }
    }
    if (position >= 0)
        System.out.println ("The patient is on waiting list: " + i+1);
    else
        System.out.println ("Your patient is not on the waiting list");

    return position;
 }