Once again, talking about my upcoming university project… I had a class today, where we could ask stuff about the project but I still haven’t decided on the best way to do this.
Basically, I have a bunch of users (some struct with a couple of members) which must be quickly searched by name and by SSN. Since I will also need to use theses users on a Graph (for other operations), I will be working with pointers.
Now, I though about using two hash tables. One where the key is the name and another where the key is the SSN. But I don’t like the idea of having two Hash Tables, simply with different keys and pointing to the same place.
It crossed my mind using a Hash Table with two keys but I don’t even know if that is possible and I believe it’s not. I just can’t think of a way to do it, maybe there is one, or maybe not.
Besides these two solutions, I can’t think of any other alternative… I may have to go with the two Hash Tables.
Do you guys suggest any other alternative?
I’d go with two hash tables. Think of it as two indexes into a database. The database is your users, and you provide two indexes: one ssn index and one name index.