Applying a query language to collections

Question

Hi, we handed in a project a while ago that was essentially to read in data from a .DAT file, store it in appropriate collections, then use a basic query language to filter through the stored data. I wasn't really happy with my querying though, as it was basically a huge succession of control statements. The queries were of the form "select OBJECTNAME where ATRIBUTE OPERATOR VALUE and ATRIBUTE OPERATOR VALUE", there could be as many sub clauses as desired (0... 200 whatever). For example "select elephant where height > 360 and weight <= 1000".
We had a comment back that we should use a Query interface and a two subclasses to represent a simple query (e.g. height > 360) and then a conjunctive query (ie simplequery1 AND simplequery2 ). The Query interface would then have a match method. I'm struggling to get my head around how I do this, does anyone have a simple example or explaination that might help me out?
Cheers.

Answer 1

I've done something like this a couple times. Your need to get a better idea of what you want your query language to look like. For example, if you're given a list of elephants, the "select elephant" part is unnecessary (your query will just return a list of matching elephants). You should decide if you want it to handle things like (height > (weight / 2)), whether conditions can be nested "((a and b) or (c and d)) and (e or f)". Will you need to support the conditional operator (a ? b : c) or a unary operator (-)? How complex will your order of operations rules be?
If you keep it simple (always two operands), you could go with something like this:
public interface QueryOperator
  public boolean eval(Object leftParam, Object rightParam);
public enum BasicOperators implements QueryOperator
public class  QueryElement
  private QueryOperator operator;
  private Object leftParam;
  private Object rightParam;
}