What is a good substitute for a big switch-case?

Question

I have objects called Country. At some point in the program, I want to set the field power of each object.

The power for each country is fixed and I have data for all 196 countries here on a piece of paper. My code should check, for instance, if the country's name is USA (and if so, set its power to 100) and so on.

I know I can do it with a switch-case, but what is the best, nicest, and most efficient way to do it?

Answer 1

You can store country-power pairs into a Dictionary<string, int> then just get the score of a particular country by using indexer:

var points = new Dictionary<string,int>(); // populate the dictionary... var usa = points["USA"]; 

Edit: As suggested in comments you should store the information in external file, for example an xml would be a good choice. That way you don't have to modify the code to add or remove countries. You just need to store them into XML file, edit it whenever you need.Then parse it when your program starts, and load the values into Dictionary.You can use LINQ to XML for that.If you haven't use it before there are good examples in the documentation to get you started.

Answer 2

Whilst Selmans answer is right and good, it does not answer how to actually populate the Dictionary. Here is it:

var map = new Dictionary<string, int> {     {"USA", 100},     {"Germany", 110} }; 

you may however also just add it as follows:

map.Add("USA", 100); map.Add("Germany", 110); 

Now you may access the value (as already mentioned by Semans):

map["USA"] = 50;        // set new value for USA int power = map["USA"]; // get new value 

EDIT: As already mentioned within comments and other answers you may of course store the data within an external file or any other data-storage. Having said this you may just initialize an empty dictionary and then fill it with the Add-method previously mentioned for every record within that storage.