Why? What’s this all about?
This is a library to handle (store-search) multi level key attributes.
The implementation was driven by the need of
- handle multiple level keys
- flexible search
- ranking/ordering
on the matches .
Lets consider data with multiple levels: category / subcategory / group / item levels for example.
If you want to find specific let’s say: subcategory, that’s an easy task. You can filter/map and you get it. But what if you have multiple attribute to match, multiple key lengths? How will you sort them? This task can be achieved, but requires more and more code and you lose fluency.
The details
The idea was, that you can easily instantiate keys, then define a collection. This way where you can pre-define the filter and sort algorithm on the collection itself, and you can use it almost the regular way.
The key has the capability to define wildcard, which is customizable.
As an example, we define a flexible matching keylength, an comparison which uses null as wildcard:
new CustomMultiKey(
KeyLengthRule.matchSmaller(),
KeyComparisonRelation.equalAndAny(null),
null
);
I choose map to store the keys, this provides even a value or it can be the key itself.
Let’s get some examples:
MultiKeyMap<String, String> map = getMap(); String aHuman = map.getIfAbsentFirst(map.newKey().addAny().add(HUMAN));
This way you will get all the human subcategory, and by your map it will be a sorted order, you will get the first one.
On the key and map you can define:
- keylength rule
- Comparison rule
- Sorting rule
All the above have already implementations provided, but by the interfaces you can easily provide further custom rules.
What features are ahead?
My future ideas revolving around more query like syntax, parallel search and multi-rule definition.
The source is available: https://github.com/PazsitZ/multilevel-keysearch
The jars available: http://pazsitz.hu/repo/hu/pazsitz/keysearch/