I would like to store a group of objects in a hashmap , where the key shall be a composite of two string values. is there a way to achieve this?
i can simply concatenate the two strings , but im sure there is a better way to do this.
9 Answers
I’d like to mention two options that I don’t think were covered in the other answers. Whether they are good for your purpose you will have to decide yourself.
Map<String, Map<String, YourObject>>
You may use a map of maps, using string 1 as key in the outer map and string 2 as key in each inner map.
I do not think it’s a very nice solution syntax-wise, but it’s simple and I have seen it used in some places. It’s also supposed to be efficient in time and memory, while this shouldn’t be the main reason in 99 % of cases. What I don’t like about it is that we’ve lost the explicit information about the type of the key: it’s only inferred from the code that the effective key is two strings, it’s not clear to read.
Map<YourObject, YourObject>
This is for a special case. I have had this situation more than once, so it’s not more special than that. If your objects contain the two strings used as key and it makes sense to define object equality based on the two, then define equals and hashCode in accordance and use the object as both key and value.
One would have wished to use a Set rather than a Map in this case, but a Java HashSet doesn’t provide any method to retrieve an object form a set based on an equal object. So we do need the map.
One liability is that you need to create a new object in order to do lookup. This goes for the solutions in many of the other answers too.
Link
Jerónimo López: Composite key in HashMaps on the efficiency of the map of maps.
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