Searching and Sorting - A Concise and Practical Introduction to Programming Algorithms in Java - page 132

increment the indicator index of the current number of elements. This dynamic
add operation code is summarized in the following listing:

Program 6.4 Adding new Person to the array
public static final int MAX ELEMENTS=100;
static int nbelements=0;
static Person [] array= new Person [MAXELEMENTS ] ;

static String LinearSearch(String lastname , String
firstname)
for ( int i=0;i < nbelements ; i++)
{ if (( lastname . equals ( array [ i ] . lastname) &&
(firstname . equals(array [ i ]. firstname))))
return array [ i ] . phone ;
return "Not found in my dictionary" ;
}

static void AddElement( Person obj )
{ if (nbelements < MAX ELEMENTS)
a r r a y [ n b e l e m e n t s++]=o b j ; // At most MAX_ELEMENTS-1 here
// nbelements is at most equal to MAX_ELEMENTS now

}

Let us illustrate the insertion operations by the following code:
public static void main ( String [ ] args )
{ AddElement( new Person( "Nielsen" , "Frank" , "0169334089" ));
AddElement( new Person( "Nelson" , "Franck" , "04227745221" ));
AddElement( new Person( "Durand" , "Paul" , "0381846245" ));
AddElement( new Person( "Dupond" , "Jean" , "0256234512" ));
AddElement( new Person( "Tanaka" , "Ken" , "[phone]" ));
System. out . println (LinearSearch( "Durand" , "Paul" ));
System. out . println (LinearSearch( "Tanaka" , "Ken" ));
System. out . println (LinearSearch( "Durand" , "Jean" ));
AddElement( new Person( "Durand" , "Jean" , "0199989796" ));
System. out . println (LinearSearch( "Durand" , "Jean" ));
}

Running this code, we get the following console output:
0381846245
[phone]
Not found in my dictionary
0199989796
The main problems of handling a collection of objects by using array data-
structures are:
- We need to know a priori the maximum number of people (so that we do
not encounter an array overflow),