Looking for a simple standalone persistent dictionary implementation in C# [closed]

Answer 1

Consider a memory mapped file. I'm not sure if there is direct support in .NET, but you could pinvoke the Win32 calls.

Answer 2

I wrote up an implementation myself based on a very similar (I think identical) requirement I had on another project a while ago. When I did it, one thing I realised was that most of the time you'll be doing writes, you only do a read rarely when the program crashes or when it's closed. So the idea is to make the writes as fast as possible. What I did was make a very simple class which would just write a log of all the operations (additions and deletions) to the dictionary as things occurred. So after a while you get a lot of repeating between keys. Because of that, once the object detects a certain amount of repetition, it'll clear the log and rewrite it so each key and its value only appears once.

Unfortunately, you can't subclass Dictionary because you can't override anything in it. This is my simple implementation, I haven't tested it though I'm sorry, I thought you might want the idea though. Feel free to use it and change it as much as you like.

class PersistentDictManager {
    const int SaveAllThreshold = 1000;

    PersistentDictManager(string logpath) {
        this.LogPath = logpath;
        this.mydictionary = new Dictionary<string, string>();
        this.LoadData();
    }

    public string LogPath { get; private set; }

    public string this[string key] {
        get{ return this.mydictionary[key]; }
        set{
            string existingvalue;
            if(!this.mydictionary.TryGetValue(key, out existingvalue)) { existingvalue = null; }
            if(string.Equals(value, existingvalue)) { return; }
            this[key] = value;

            // store in log
            if(existingvalue != null) { // was an update (not a create)
                if(this.IncrementSaveAll()) { return; } // because we're going to repeat a key the log
            }
            this.LogStore(key, value);
        }
    }

    public void Remove(string key) {
        if(!this.mydictionary.Remove(key)) { return; }
        if(this.IncrementSaveAll()) { return; } // because we're going to repeat a key in the log
        this.LogDelete(key);
    }

    private void CreateWriter() {
        if(this.writer == null) {
            this.writer = new BinaryWriter(File.Open(this.LogPath, FileMode.Open)); 
        }
    }

    private bool IncrementSaveAll() {
        ++this.saveallcount;
        if(this.saveallcount >= PersistentDictManager.SaveAllThreshold) {
            this.SaveAllData();
            return true;
        }
        else { return false; }
    }

    private void LoadData() {
        try{
            using(BinaryReader reader = new BinaryReader(File.Open(LogPath, FileMode.Open))) {
                while(reader.PeekChar() != -1) {
                    string key = reader.ReadString();
                    bool isdeleted = reader.ReadBoolean();
                    if(isdeleted) { this.mydictionary.Remove(key); }
                    else {
                        string value = reader.ReadString();
                        this.mydictionary[key] = value;
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        catch(FileNotFoundException) { }
    }

    private void LogDelete(string key) {
        this.CreateWriter();
        this.writer.Write(key);
        this.writer.Write(true); // yes, key was deleted
    }

    private void LogStore(string key, string value) {
        this.CreateWriter();
        this.writer.Write(key);
        this.writer.Write(false); // no, key was not deleted
        this.writer.Write(value);
    }

    private void SaveAllData() {
        if(this.writer != null) {
            this.writer.Close();
            this.writer = null;
        }
        using(BinaryWriter writer = new BinaryWriter(File.Open(this.LogPath, FileMode.Create))) {
            foreach(KeyValuePair<string, string> kv in this.mydictionary) {
                writer.Write(kv.Key);
                writer.Write(false); // is not deleted flag
                writer.Write(kv.Value);
            }
        }
    }

    private readonly Dictionary<string, string> mydictionary;
    private int saveallcount = 0;
    private BinaryWriter writer = null;
}

Answer 3

I am not much of a programmer, but wouldn't creating a really simple XML format to store your data do the trick?

<dico> 
   <dicEntry index="x">
     <key>MyKey</key>
     <val type="string">My val</val>
   </dicEntry>
   ...
</dico>

From there, you load the XML file DOM and fill up your dictionary as you like,

XmlDocument xdocDico = new XmlDocument();
string sXMLfile;
public loadDico(string sXMLfile, [other args...])
{
   xdocDico.load(sXMLfile);
   // Gather whatever you need and load it into your dico
}
public flushDicInXML(string sXMLfile, dictionary dicWhatever)
{
   // Dump the dic in the XML doc & save
}
public updateXMLDOM(index, key, value)
{
   // Update a specific value of the XML DOM based on index or key
}

Then whenever you want, you can update the DOM and save it on disk.

xdocDico.save(sXMLfile);

If you can afford to keep the DOM in memory performance-wise, it's pretty easy to deal with. Depending on your requirements, you may not even need the dictionary at all.