I'd like to send a shout out & much thanks to Nilesh Thakkar, a software engineer at SIHL in India for recommending I introduce Syntax Highlighter into this blog. It provides a super simple way to display source code to fellow developers. You'll see it used in all future posts.
Incidentally, for anyone else writing a blog on Blogger, Matthew Ball has provided a step-by-step explanation of how to add Syntax Highlighter.
Thank you, Nilesh!!
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Encoding & Decoding Bit-Sums For a CheckBoxList
Have you ever had occasion where you need to allow users to select one or more items in a list? With ASP.Net a good UI control to do that with is the CheckBoxList. Here's a pair of examples:
Then the question arises, how do you store their selections? If the potential list is quite long then you're probably going to want to use a CDF string of the values you've assigned to each list item - example: "2,3,11,17,34"
But for smaller, more finite lists a good way to go is with bit-encoded sums. You assign each list item a base-2 value, such as:
Encoding the values is very straightforward. Here's a little algorithm that does the job:
Decoding though is somewhat trickier. I imagine there are many possible approaches. Here's a method I created to do the job:
Then the question arises, how do you store their selections? If the potential list is quite long then you're probably going to want to use a CDF string of the values you've assigned to each list item - example: "2,3,11,17,34"
But for smaller, more finite lists a good way to go is with bit-encoded sums. You assign each list item a base-2 value, such as:
- Item A 2^0 = 1
- Item B 2^1 = 2
- Item C 2^2 = 4
- Item D 2^3 = 8
Encoding the values is very straightforward. Here's a little algorithm that does the job:
int newSum = 0; foreach (ListItem item in checkBoxList.Items) { if (item.Selected) newSum += Convert.ToInt32(item.Value); }
Decoding though is somewhat trickier. I imagine there are many possible approaches. Here's a method I created to do the job:
private void SelectCblItems(CheckBoxList cbl, int sum) { // Determine the largest Base-2 Power that comprises sum int maxPower = (int)Math.Log(sum, 2); for (int pow = maxPower; pow >= 0; pow--) { int partSum = (int)Math.Pow(2, pow); if (partSum <= sum) { ListItem listItem = cbl.Items.FindByValue(partSum.ToString()); if (listItem != null) listItem.Selected = true; sum -= partSum; } } }
Labels:
ASP.net,
bit encoding,
C#,
CheckBoxList,
decode,
encode
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