Java: Composite key in hashmaps

Question

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.

Answer 1

Reading about the spaguetti/cactus stack I came up with a variant which may serve for this purpose, including the possibility of mapping your keys in any order so that map.lookup("a","b") and map.lookup("b","a") returns the same element. It also works with any number of keys not just two.

I use it as a stack for experimenting with dataflow programming but here is a quick and dirty version which works as a multi key map (it should be improved: Sets instead of arrays should be used to avoid looking up duplicated ocurrences of a key)

public class MultiKeyMap <K,E> {
    class Mapping {
        E element;
        int numKeys;
        public Mapping(E element,int numKeys){
            this.element = element;
            this.numKeys = numKeys;
        }
    }
    class KeySlot{
        Mapping parent;
        public KeySlot(Mapping mapping) {
            parent = mapping;
        }
    }
    class KeySlotList extends LinkedList<KeySlot>{}
    class MultiMap extends HashMap<K,KeySlotList>{}
    class MappingTrackMap extends HashMap<Mapping,Integer>{}

    MultiMap map = new MultiMap();

    public void put(E element, K ...keys){
        Mapping mapping = new Mapping(element,keys.length);
        for(int i=0;i<keys.length;i++){
            KeySlot k = new KeySlot(mapping);
            KeySlotList l = map.get(keys[i]);
            if(l==null){
                l = new KeySlotList();
                map.put(keys[i], l);
            }
            l.add(k);
        }
    }
    public E lookup(K ...keys){
        MappingTrackMap tmp  = new MappingTrackMap();
        for(K key:keys){
            KeySlotList l = map.get(key);
            if(l==null)return null;
            for(KeySlot keySlot:l){
                Mapping parent = keySlot.parent;
                Integer count = tmp.get(parent);
                if(parent.numKeys!=keys.length)continue;
                if(count == null){
                    count = parent.numKeys-1;
                }else{
                    count--;
                }
                if(count == 0){
                    return parent.element;
                }else{
                    tmp.put(parent, count);
                }               
            }
        }
        return null;
    }
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        MultiKeyMap<String,String> m = new MultiKeyMap<String,String>();
        m.put("brazil", "yellow", "green");
        m.put("canada", "red", "white");
        m.put("USA", "red" ,"white" ,"blue");
        m.put("argentina", "white","blue");

        System.out.println(m.lookup("red","white"));  // canada
        System.out.println(m.lookup("white","red"));  // canada
        System.out.println(m.lookup("white","red","blue")); // USA
    }
}

Answer 2

You could have a custom object containing the two strings:

class StringKey {
    private String str1;
    private String str2;
}

Problem is, you need to determine the equality test and the hash code for two such objects.

Equality could be the match on both strings and the hashcode could be the hashcode of the concatenated members (this is debatable):

class StringKey {
    private String str1;
    private String str2;

    @Override
    public boolean equals(Object obj) {
        if(obj != null && obj instanceof StringKey) {
            StringKey s = (StringKey)obj;
            return str1.equals(s.str1) && str2.equals(s.str2);
        }
        return false;
    }

    @Override
    public int hashCode() {
        return (str1 + str2).hashCode();
    }
}