C# associative array

Question

I've been using a Hashtable, but by nature, hashtables are not ordered, and I need to keep everything in order as I add them (because I want to pull them out in the same order). Forexample if I do:

pages["date"] = new FreeDateControl("Date:", false, true, false);
pages["plaintiff"] = new FreeTextboxControl("Primary Plaintiff:", true, true, false);
pages["loaned"] = new FreeTextboxControl("Amount Loaned:", true, true, false);
pages["witness"] = new FreeTextboxControl("EKFG Witness:", true, true, false);

And when I do a foreach I want to be able to get it in the order of:

pages["date"]  
pages["plaintiff"]  
pages["loaned"]  
pages["witness"] 

How can I do this?

Answer 1

I believe that .NET has the OrderedDictionary class to deal with this. It is not generic, but it can serve as a decent Hashtable substitute - if you don't care about strict type safety.

I've written a generic wrapper around this class, which I would be willing to share.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.collections.specialized.ordereddictionary.aspx

Answer 2

EDIT: LBushkin is right - OrderedDictionary looks like it does the trick, albeit in a non-generic way. It's funny how many specialized collections there are which don't have generic equivalents :( (It would make sense for Malfist to change the accepted answer to LBushkin's.)

(I thought that...) .NET doesn't have anything built-in to do this.

Basically you'll need to keep a List<string> as well as a Dictionary<string,FreeTextboxControl>. When you add to the dictionary, add the key to the list. Then you can iterate through the list and find the keys in insertion order. You'll need to be careful when you remove or replace items though.