Description of the Container Service. More...

Description of the Container Service.

The OpenClovis Container Library provides basic data management facilities by means of Container abstraction. It provides a common interface for all Container types. It provides the following functions:

• Adds a node to the Container.
• Finds a node in a Container when the key is specified.
• Deletes all the nodes associated with a specific key.
• Deletes a specific node from the Container.
• Returns the first node in the Container.
• Returns the last node in the Container.
• Returns the previous node in the Container.
• Returns the next node in the Container.
• Returns the number of nodes associated with a specific key.
• Returns the total number of nodes in the Container.

When adding data into the Container, you must specify a tuple consisting of key and data. The data is associated with specified key. You can associate multiple data with the same key. This can be done by specifying same key when adding data. Before any of the afore-mentioned operations can be performed on the Container, the Container must be created. Container creation is achieved through a specific Container create operation. Currently, the Container Library supports the following three types of specific Containers:

• Doubly Linked list
• Hash-table (supporting open-hashing)
• Red-black trees (balanced binary tree)

It is important to realize that by using the Container abstraction, you can switch Containers without having to rewrite a significant section of their code. Only the Container creation call needs to be changed appropriately. This is explained further with an example in a later section. This document contains the definitions and function prototypes for the Container Library.

Interaction with other components

Container APIs depend on the Heap utility for memory allocation and deallocation.