Data class concept

[qtDave]

Hello,

I am fairly new to Qt and C++ and have built small apps so far for learning purposes.

I would like to built an application now that is useful in my work but I would like to receive some information on the concept of handling lots of data.

It would have to handle data that may involved of 1000's of data entities (data points).

Each data entity would typically consist of several properties like X, Y and Z coordinates, physical properties, text strings etc.

So, I would build a data class that correspond with 1 data entity, containing properties (private) and functions to load, save, change the values etc.

Now my question is, if I have a dataset with e.g. 10,000 data entities, what is the best practise to handle this and save this to or read from a single file?

Can you just use an array or list or something with dimension 10,000 where every array or list item is of the type of the self-built data class?

I have a feeling that this is not the best practice because it would require to much memory and become slow if you want to edit large portions of data at once (or display data on a graph for instance).


Thank you for your tips and tricks!!

Cheers,

Dave

[fullmetalcoder]

Basically you have to create a struct for your data type and then place instances of this type (or pointer to such instances) into a container. The most adapted container depends on the way you data will be used (containers always make tradeoffs between traversal speed/inserting speed/removal speed/...) so you have to figure that out before being able to chose the proper container or design your own.

[qtDave]

Thank you for this answer.

If my base data is more complex, I mean can have variable length etc and not a fixed number of subfields, I use a class instead of a struct. And the container class then contains a bunch of dataclass items...

The container class I will use will be a QList.