CODEWITHSUNDEEP
.netvb.netcollectionsloops
Mike L.
Mike L.

Reputation: 1966

Iterate though collection in VB .Net (like it was an associative array!)

I don't use .Net unless I have to, and for this project I have to. I like the PHP way of doing things but, it seems I am stuck with using a Collection of Object's to store/retrieve the data I need. I have my Collection loaded with my Objects's and the code to iterate through the collection, my problem is I am unable to retrieve the "key" as it would be called in PHP (I believe in this case it is actually the name of the object). Consider the following example:

            Dim xDoc As XPathDocument = New XPathDocument(fName)
            Dim xNav As XPathNavigator = xDoc.CreateNavigator()

            Dim sender As XPathNodeIterator
            sender = xNav.Select("/data/sender/val")
            While (sender.MoveNext())
                SenderInfo.Add(sender.Current.GetAttribute("n", ""), sender.Current.Value)
            End While

            For Each item As Object In SenderInfo
                Dim value As String = item.ToString()
                //need to store the key here
                Dim key As String = Nothing
            Next

As you can see, I am navigating an XML document, and creating an Object with some Key/Value pairs. The Object would look something like this if it were in JSON:

{"name":"John Smith","address1":"123 Anywhere St.","city":"This City","state":"FL"}

When I iterate though the Collection I can only get the value of the object, but I need the Key, in this instance I want "name","address1","city","state" to be stored in a variable for each iteration.

Any ideas? Or am I going about this the wrong way?

Thanks in advance for the help, I am truly stuck on this one!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2963

Answers (2)

Joel Coehoorn
Joel Coehoorn

Reputation: 415820

It's hard to be sure right now what you want to do with this code, and that can make all the difference in the world for what I would recommend to do instead. But it sounds like you really want a class like this:

<Serializable()>
Public Class Sender

    Public Property Name
    Public Property Address1
    Public Property City
    Public Property State

End Class

And then replace your existing code with something like this:

Dim xmlRdr As New Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer(GetType(Sender))

Using fileStream As New StreamReader(fName)
     Dim mySender As Sender = xmlRdr.Deserialize(fileStream)
End Using

You'll probably need a few more attributes in the class to tweak what the deserializer expects the xml to look like. You can read more about serialization here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms950721.aspx

Upvotes: 3

dario_ramos
dario_ramos

Reputation: 7309

SenderInfo should be a Dictionary<String,String>. Here's the documentation and example code, at the bottom, including VB.NET.

Upvotes: 5

Related Questions