put() method

Hello, I have more than 500 film titles to save to disk in a HashMap. I am finding it tedious to repeat the below statement with the put() method. Instead, I wrote a for loop which tests to see if a given key, Film 1 etc, is in the HashMap. If not, the next number is assigned to the variable film1. The code with the for loop is after the broken line. Does anyone know whether the for loop will actually do what I have described?

finally {
          name = film_name;
          FilmBean name = new FilmBean(film_name, genre_name, year2, actor_name, length2, audio2);
          container.put("Film 1", name);
          container.put("Film 2", name);
          container.put("Film 3", name);
          container.put("Film 4", name);
          container.put("Film 5", name);
          container.put("Film 6", name);
          container.put("Film 7", name);
          container.put("Film 8", name);
             int SIZE = container.size();
               System.out.println(SIZE);
                 if(container.containsValue("LastTango")) System.out.println("Last Tango");
}
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
         finally {
          name = film_name;
          FilmBean film = new FilmBean(film_name, genre_name, year, actor_name, length, audio);
         for(int i = 1; i < 1000; i++) {
              String film1 = "Film ";
              if(container.containsKey("Film " + i)) continue;
              else film1 = film1 + i;
         }
          container.put(film1, name);
}

You should start your post with a problem description -- what are you trying
to do, what is you goal? From the sound of it, having
contiguous keys "film1", "film2", ..., I wonder why you want a Map
at all -- why not use a List?

>whether the for loop will actually do

One quick way is to execute the code and see. Do it for 10 vs 1000 for testing.

Are all the values in the container supposed to be the same? Your code creates many unique keys all of which have the save value!

Henri --

At the end of the other thread, I thought you understood how to use a Map, but now it's looking like you didn't. If you want to look up a film by it's title, then the key has to be the title, and the value has to be the film object. The code you've shown here uses the eight strings "Film 1" ... "Film 8" as the keys, and stores the name of one film as the value.

You don't say where the film data is coming from, and you don't say what you're trying to do now with the "Film 1" strings, so I really can't tell you exactly what to do. Can you explain in general terms what this code is supposed to do, and then we can tell you how to write it?

Or better yet, do you understand what a Map does? Can you explain it?

Thanks for your feedback, it is really appreciated. I have never used a HashMap. I had thought that the key would be the film number, and the value would be the title. I think the key, if it is the title will be accociated with the bean. Am I right?

The code you show here seems to be doing the right thing, but it's totally different from the code you showed last. Is this change deliberate?

Thanks Ernest. I have begun to enter the film titles and it works. I was complicating things alot for nothing. I find Java very intimidating. I had one last question. I have set the capacity of the Hashmap to 1000. Does this affect memory?

Generally you should just leave the capacity alone, and accept the default. It only affects the initial memory/speed tradeoff; over time, as much memory is allocated as is needed, anyway, no matter what the initial capacity setting is.

Ok thanks for the tip...