Dynamic variable names

[omar alizzi]

Hi there,
Can you dynamically create a variable name in Java? I have an application that parses through XML data and gets an unknown number of a data object type. I want to be able to create a new data object with a new variable name corresponding to its ID everytime I get one. Is this do-able? I know I could do it with ejbeans, but don't want to use ejbeans in this case.
Thanks for the help!
Regards,
Omar....

[Jim Yingst]

You can't create a variable name dynamically in Java. To do what you're trying to do, you could create a HashMap to store all the variables pertaining to a given record / object / file / whatever. If the XML parser tells you there is an element named "author" with a value of "John Steinbeck", use
<code><pre>map.put("author", "John Steinbeck")</pre></code>
to store the value. Then later when you need to access it, use
<code><pre>String value = map.get("author")</pre></code>
Will that work for you?