[kepler-dev] Map / Dictionary Actor

[Dan Higgins]

Hi Ian,
    I do not know of an actor that does exactly what you describe. 
However, it struck me that the Ptolemy 'record' data type is basically 
just a HashMap/Dictionary. And the RecordUpdater actor does let you 
build/extend a record (i.e. a Dictionary). Note also that there is a 
'get' method in the RecordToken object that allows one to search a 
record by key. So, in any case, you might want to consider using a 
'record' in building a Dictionary actor.

Dan Higgins

----

ian.brown at hsbcib.com wrote:
>
> I'm looking for something like a HashMap or Dictionary Actor and, 
> before implementing one myself, wanted to check that one does not 
> already exist that I have simply overlooked.
> The issue is as follows - from a file or a database, I need to read a 
> list of Instrument, Pair sizes. For example, if I want to buy 50 Euros 
> and 20 pounds, I may get the following as input:
>
> EUR, 50
> GBP, 20
>
> Once I have read this data, I want to be able to request what the size 
> of EUR should be (in this case 50). This is very similar to the Lookup 
> Actor except that we're looking up based on a key rather than on an 
> index. It's a typical HashMap.
>
> I would envisage an actor with 3 input ports and 2 output ports as 
> follows:
>
> inputs:
>
> -> set_key_in
> -> set_val_in
> -> query_key_in
>
> output:
>
> <- key_out
> <- val_out
>
> set_key_in, set_val_in are used to populate the HashMap with key, 
> value pairs.
>
> a token on query_key_in will look up an entry in the HashMap and 
> output the result to the output ports. An additional output port could 
> give a boolean signal if there was no such entry.
>
> Another boolean input could be used to flush all of the contained 
> entries to the output as a sequence of tokens (SequenceToArray could 
> then package these into an array or a RecordAssembler could package 
> them into records).
>
> Does such an actor already exist? If not, does the above sound like a 
> sensible implementation?
>
> Ian
>
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