Using a hasmap value in an if statement

Question

Hello all,
I have a hashmap that has a hashmap for its value. Basically the the main hash map contains a "location" as the key and the value is a hash map that has two keys one for "assessed" which value will be "yes" or "no" and the other key is "stenosis" which puts a value such as 25, 34, 98 etc..
The has map get populated fine. what I need to do now is access the hash map and check the value of the assessed key and if the value = yes then do some code..
my problem is when I step through the code even though the value of the assessed key yes the if statement does not evaluate to true.
below is the section of my code in question that takes the vesselAssessd hashmap and sets up an iterator to grab each value of the child hashmap and use the if statement to process code depending if the child value = yes.
            // set up an iterator and look through the vesselAssessed HashMap
            Iterator vesselKeys = vesselAssessed.keySet().iterator();
            while(vesselKeys.hasNext()){
                String currentVesselKey = (String)vesselKeys.next();
                HashMap vesselChilds = (HashMap)vesselAssessed.get(currentVesselKey);
                Set childsKeySet = vesselChilds.keySet();
                Iterator childsKey = childsKeySet.iterator();
                // Set up the child keys and values of the current vessel
                while (childsKey.hasNext()){
                    String currentChildKey = (String)childsKey.next();
                    String childValue = (String)vesselChilds.get(currentChildKey);
                    // if the childValue = "yes" then add the stenosis into the
                    // database
                    if (childValue == "yes"){
                        {the code that will run}
                    }I verified that the string is all in the right case. Is there something im overlooking??
Thanks,
Dean

Answer 1

Danny is spot on, but a little elaboration for the beginner:
childValue == "yes" asks whether these two are the exact same String object. There are times when that's true, but it's unlikely. Instead, use String equals() ( childValue.equals("yes") ) to ask whether the two have the same value.
With the simple class Danny suggests:
class Vessel {
   private boolean assessed;
   private int stenosis;
   public boolean isAssessed() { return assessed; }
}All you need in the loop is
Iterator vessels = vesselAssessed.values().iterator();
while (vessels.hasNext()) {
   Vessel vessel = (Vessel) vessels.next();
   if (vessel.isAssessed()) {
}