Thread: Optimum solution for objects

Hi all,
Sorry for the title, but i couldnt think of a way to describe my problem.

I am creating an apointment application. This programm will have the ability to book apointments for a number of different services, such as doctors, hairdressers, teachers etc for a number of cities.
These information will be placed on a combo box and ideally i would like to provide only the options available acording to the choices made so far.
So, for example we have
A Pediatric in London
A Vet in London
A Sergeon in Berlin
A Barber in Berlin
A Heardresser in Rome
A Programmer teacher in London
An English teacher in Rome

My thinking is that the user choses the city, for example London, then there will be a type of service combo box. In this case (of London) it will hold Doctors and Teachers. If Doctors is chosen, the next field will hold the available Medical specialty, i.e. Pediatrics and Vets and according to that choice the apropriate doctor will pop up.

My problem is not how to programm that. i havent got there yet.
My problem is how to design it! I am thinking that each individual will be an object. each having the same fields, city, type of service etc. But in such a way i am not sure how i can manage to get all the appropriate information in order to poppulate the combo boxes.
I would have to search all the objects for each combo box?
From a rough testing i did, i think i could easily get all the individuals that resign in London, but that would give me two records for the doctors(for example).

ANY idea will be highly appreciated, since i am stuck right now!

Thanks in advance, ilias

If you force the user to go the way: City -> Job -> Speciality -> Person
the it is a simple tree structure.

The root node has a list of all cities as its children, each city has a list of jobs as their children, each job has a list of specialities as their children and each speciality has a list of people as their children.
You could even generate the number of combo boxes on the fly to match the depth of the tree. This way you could have jobs with no specialities or certain people who are listed but have no job.

hm... trees?!
never used them before.
Can i use the tree nodes on an object?
If i got it right, many of the data will be repeated for each city.
for example having a pediatric in London and in Berlin would look something like that:
London Berlin
| \ |
Doctor ..... Doctor
| |
Pediatric Pediatric
| |
Dr A Dr B
In this case both "Doctor" and "Pediatric" are repeated for both cities. Did i understand this right?

i will have to create a new tree, having 2 attributes, its name and its parent name.
So, it will be something like

Class Tree(){....}
 
ArrayList<Tree> tree;
tree.add("London");
tree.add("Berlin");
tree.add("Doctor","London");
tree.add("Doctor","Berlin");

but how would i add a pediatric to the Londons doctor branch and not to the berlin branch?

Could you give me some sample code please?
Thanks for the info, at least i have something else to work with now.
ilias