Lost in time and space...

Problem: Given a set of keywords (or key phrases), provide a mechanism to suggest to user whether s/he is typing a valid word or phrase (i.e. word or phrase from the given list).

Example: Suppose, you wanted to maintain a list of commonly used English words like :

brake, boiling, driving, error, even, event

Then if user :
Types “e”   --> System should suggest –> even, event
Types “br” --> System should suggest –> brake

I had this problem with an additional caveat – the list of words/phrases were actually description of features & with every suggestion i wanted to maintain the association with the feature object. It was close to a generic dictionary in C# only that the key-search was based on “starts with” instead of an exact key match.

So, here’s a simple solution that worked for me. The idea similar to a Definite Finite Automata, only that I’ve  exploited the dictionary generics of C# to maintain the transitions. Here’s how the main classes look like:

The generic type T represents the type of the object to be associated with every keyword. A the library and a sample client is shared in my Aha World site. The project is called the SmartTextStore.

Here’s a snap of the sample client with a list of about 850 English words (the word list is included in the solution zip).

The solution was developed in Visual Studio 2008 as that’s what i had in my machine. However, the underlying principle for SmartTextStore is simple enough to be ported in Visual Studio 2005 or lesser as long as there is support for generics.

# posted by Ram Adhikari @ 8:41 AM 0 Comments