Creating hashmap/map from XML resources

Question

I'm making an application where a web service fetches (amongst other) a bunch of codes from a webservice (I.e BEL, FRA, SWE). During runtime I want to translate these codes to their apporiate names to display to users (I.e Belgium, France, Sweden). There can be a lot of these codes, so i'm wondering if there is any approriate way to store the (code, name) entry as a some sort of map in the XML resources in Android, so I can quickly fetch the name by the given code?

It's all about speed here, since the map can have a few hundred entries.

Answer 1

Also you can define a map in XML, put it in res/xml and parse to HashMap (suggested in this post). If you want to keep key order parse to LinkedHashMap. Simple implementation follows:

Map resource in res/xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <map linked="true">     <entry key="key1">value1</entry>     <entry key="key2">value2</entry>     <entry key="key3">value3</entry> </map> 

Resource parser:

public class ResourceUtils {     public static Map<String,String> getHashMapResource(Context c, int hashMapResId) {         Map<String,String> map = null;         XmlResourceParser parser = c.getResources().getXml(hashMapResId);          String key = null, value = null;          try {             int eventType = parser.getEventType();              while (eventType != XmlPullParser.END_DOCUMENT) {                 if (eventType == XmlPullParser.START_DOCUMENT) {                     Log.d("utils","Start document");                 } else if (eventType == XmlPullParser.START_TAG) {                     if (parser.getName().equals("map")) {                         boolean isLinked = parser.getAttributeBooleanValue(null, "linked", false);                          map = isLinked ? new LinkedHashMap<String, String>() : new HashMap<String, String>();                     } else if (parser.getName().equals("entry")) {                         key = parser.getAttributeValue(null, "key");                          if (null == key) {                             parser.close();                             return null;                         }                     }                 } else if (eventType == XmlPullParser.END_TAG) {                     if (parser.getName().equals("entry")) {                         map.put(key, value);                         key = null;                         value = null;                     }                 } else if (eventType == XmlPullParser.TEXT) {                     if (null != key) {                         value = parser.getText();                     }                 }                 eventType = parser.next();             }         } catch (Exception e) {             e.printStackTrace();             return null;         }          return map;     } } 

Answer 2

Today I came across the same problem and studying developer.android.com for a long time didn't help since Android resources cannot be hashes (maps), only arrays.

So I found 2 ways:

1. Have a string array of values like "BEL|Belgium", parse those string early in the program and store in a Map<>

2. Have 2 string arrays: first with the values of "BEL", "FRA", "SWE" and second with "Belgium", "France", "Sweden".

Second is more sensitive cause you have to synchronize changes and order in both arrays simultaneously.