I have data that I’ve extracted from a database, that I wish to pass to
a calling (external) piece of software through Drb.
The are a large number of data set formats, but an employee based
example might look something like:
ID Name Age
1 Mary Smith 23
3 Frank Zappa 52
19 Mary Jones 41
I’m trying to find a “nice” structure to pass this data around in, so
that it can be easily understood and manipulated.
I’m currently using an Array of Hashes so it looks something like:
[ { :id => 1, :name => “Mary Smith”, :age => 23 }, { :id => 3, :name =>
“Frank Zappa”, :age => 52 }, { :id =>19, :name => “Mary Jones”, :age =>
41 } ]
or more nicely formatted
[
{ :id => 1, :name => “Mary Smith”, :age => 23 },
{ :id => 3, :name => “Frank Zappa”, :age => 52 },
{ :id =>19, :name => “Mary Jones”, :age => 41 }
]
This is fine if I want to extract single pieces of information, but it’s
clumsy to manipulate the whole array, for example, extract out all the
names, sort the array by age, create a new array containing employees
over 40. It’s also inefficient as I’m repeating the labels on every
record.
I realise I can do this by writing block code to process the array, but
I feel there must be a cleaner way to store and manipulate data of this
form in ruby. Something on the lines of Struct would be great to remove
the excessing labels, but Struct doesn’t help with the array
manipulation.
Suggestions would be really welcome, preferabling using standard
classes, but will look at extensions.
thanks,
Anthony W…