Ive been struggling to figure out what the correct way to do this is.
I have a table in Excel that relates Motor horsepower size to the amount of space it takes up.
I would like to implement a lookup function of this information in a C# Windows Form that I am writing.
I want to create a function that has a single argument passed to it (double HP). It would lookup if the motor HP falls in-between "Low" and "High" and then it would return the value in the "Space Factor" column. I feel pretty silly for not knowing the best way to do this. I want to avoid IF/Else statements as it doesnt seem like the right approach. Additionally, interfacing with Excel to do the lookup also seems a little silly.
How would you interface with a data table like this?
>Solution :
You should create an class to represent your rows, you can then add each object to a list. If you have few items you can just use Linq:
var hp = 20;
var objects = new List<MyClass>(){...};
var foundObj = objects.FirstOrDefault(o => hp > o.HpLow && hp < o.HpHigh);
if(foundObj != null){
// Found object!
}
If you have lots of rows you can instead sort the list by the HpHigh, and use BinarySearch to find the item without iterating over all items, but it requires a custom comparer and is a bit more complex.
If hp-ranges can overlap for you need some way to determine which of the rows is the most fitting one, so I’m just going to assume ranges do not overlap.