Counting occurrences of objects in J2EE application

Question

Relative newbie here.

I am trying to count occurrences of objects in a J2EE web application. Very simple.

I have an Oracle database, with a table called Warnings. Each warning can have one of three statuses:

• ACTIVE
• AUTOCLEARED
• CLEARED

I have a WARNING_SUPPRESSED and a WARNING_SUPERSEDED column in my table. The values these columns hold is then used to determine the state of a warning. There is no warning_status column, so the status of the warning is worked out as follows:

NB - I would like to point out that I currently have 5 warning objects, one of which is cleared. So, I have 4 active and 1 cleared warning.

I have some logic in the servlet:

  for (Warning warning : warnings)
  {
     // logic to check and count occurrences of each type of warning 
     int activeCount      = 0;
     int clearedCount     = 0;
     int autoclearedCount = 0;

     // warning is active if it is not superseded and not suppressed
     if( ((warning.getWarningSuperseded() != null && warning.getWarningSuperseded().equals("N"))  
           && ((warning.getWarningSuppressed() != null && warning.getWarningSuppressed().equals("N")))))
     {
        activeCount++;
     }
     // warning is cleared if it is superseded
     if(warning.getWarningSuperseded() != null && warning.getWarningSuperseded().equals("Y"))
     {
        clearedCount++;
     }
     // warning is autocleared if it is suppressed
     else if (warning.getWarningSuppressed() != null && warning.getWarningSuppressed().equals("Y"))
     {
        autoclearedCount++;
     }

  }      

So, what I think I am trying to do here is, in pseudo code:

if warning not superseded and warning not suppressed 
    then increment activeCount;
if warning is superseded 
    then increment clearedCount;
if warning is suppressed
    then increment autoclearedCount;

When debugging this in Eclipse, I get activeCount to be 8, clearedCount to be 3 and autoclearedCount to be 1. I don't quite get why this is, because as far as I am concerned, I only have 5 warning objects, 4 active and 1 cleared.

What I am then doing, just to check that I have the amount of warnings I think I have:

 warningCount = warningServices.getWarningCount(MyServletHelper.getCurrentSchema(request)); 

This returns 4 - the method getWarningCount() only returns a count of warnings that are active.

I can only assume there's some kind of flaw in my logic here - I don't know if it's just because I have had a long day or what, but this doesn't make sense to me!

Sometimes all it takes is for a fresh pair of eyes to see what I am doing wrong...

Answer 1

adding to gvo's answer: Tom, you should use continue operator in if block or you could use if-else-elseif properly. ie:

if (){.....}
    else if(){.....}
    else {.....}

change your code accordingly and let us know the result.

[edited] The code you wrote...technically program control could go in to two if block is a pass.

Answer 2

Are you sure you only have 5 warning objects? How did you get the values you mentioned?

You should try to debug (System.out.println ) to understand how your code is working.

But the first thing that really surprises me is that you reinitialize your values within the loop.

  for (Warning warning : warnings)
  {
     // logic to check and count occurrences of each type of warning 
     int activeCount      = 0;
     int clearedCount     = 0;
     int autoclearedCount = 0;

     [..] counters ++;
  }

Each time you'll go in a new warning, you'll lost the previous values.. So I don't even understand how values can be greater that one at the end of your loop.

Following your edit in the question : try to use simpler things when you debug. I don't know

 WarningServices.getWarningCount(MyServletHelper.getCurrentSchema(request)); 

but i trust

warnings.size()

system.out.println ('Hello, I incremented activeCount, here the warning doing that' + warning.info()..);

in the ifs just near the counter++., and just after the loop. Sometimes, the simpler the better. The reason why the values are wrong are probably not in the code sample you show.