Usuful methods – 10 of N – Dictionary with unique values

The .NET Dictionary<TKey, TValue> is a great class.

MSDN:

The Dictionary<(Of <(TKey, TValue>)>) generic class provides a mapping from a set of keys to a set of values. Each addition to the dictionary consists of a value and its associated key. Retrieving a value by using its key is very fast, close to O(1), because the Dictionary<(Of <(TKey, TValue>)>) class is implemented as a hash table

I’m using this class very often. I’m not going to explain when to use a dictionary, an array, a sorted array or a tree or any other data structures – there is a lot of articles on this subject on the net. Instead I’ll extend the class and I’ll constraint the set of values to be unique which will give us a one-to-one mapping.It’s a very simple thing to do.

public class UniqueValuesDictionary<TKey, TValue> : Dictionary<TKey, TValue>
{
    public new void Add(TKey key, TValue value)
    {
        if (this.Values.Count > 0)
        {
            bool hasDuplicates = this.Values.Contains(value);
            if (hasDuplicates)
            {
                throw new ArgumentException("An element with the same value already exists.");
            }
        }
        base.Add(key, value);
    }
}

And here’s an example which demonstrates how this class will help us find errors

            var lookup = new Dictionary<int, string>();
            lookup.Add(1, "One");
            lookup.Add(2, "One");   // No exception as expected

            var uniqueLookup = new UniqueValuesDictionary<int, string>();
            uniqueLookup.Add(1, "One");
            uniqueLookup.Add(2, "One"); // Here we'll get an exception

~ by ppetrov on July 4, 2008.