Thread: Need help--trying to use an if/else statement that depends on which of 2 arrayLists an object is in.

I have two arraylists. One is personalContactList. The other is businessContactList.

1. I want to take user input that references an object attribute (int),
2. Use it to determine which object is referenced,
3. Find the "type" attribute of that object,
4. Determine which arraylist the object belongs to, based on that type,
5. Use the if else/statement to print out some attributes that depends on which arraylist the object is in.

I believe the code successfully does 1-3, and probably 4. But there is a hangup on 5. I get an indexoutofbounds execption. Which I'm not sure I understand very well.

Also, I'm very new to programming, so I may be missing things that are very obvious to most of you all.

Here is the code--it's part of a switch statement:

case "c": {
                //some code here prints out a list
 
                boolean b = false;                    
                int g;
 
                while (b == false) {
 
                        Scanner detailScanner = new Scanner(System.in);
                        System.out.print("Enter a number to see details: ");
                        g = detailScanner.nextInt();
 
                        if (personalContactList.get(g).type.equals("personal")) {                     
                            System.out.println(personalContactList.get(g).type);
 
                        } else {                            
                            System.out.println(businessContactList.get(g).type);                            
                        } 
 
                        b = true;
                    }
                    break;

Any suggestions?

Welcome to the forum! Thanks for taking the time to learn how to post code correctly. If you haven't already, please read this topic to learn other useful info for new members.

When you're requesting help with an error message, please post the entire message, stack trace and all.

There is a maximum number of elements in the lists. The index of the first element is 0, the index of the last element is maxIndex. If g > maxIndex, then you'll get an index out of bounds exception. You can determine the value of maxIndex using an ArrayList method. Review the ArrayList API to find out how.

Thanks for the info--I will read up on it.

The exact error changes depending on how many and what type of objects are in the arraylist. For example, if I have one business contact object in the business arraylist and one personal object in the personal arraylist, the program crashes when I enter a 0 or 1. I get this:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException: Index: 1, Size: 1
at java.util.ArrayList.rangeCheck(ArrayList.java:638)
at java.util.ArrayList.get(ArrayList.java:414)
at contactlistapp2.ContactListApp2.main(ContactListAp p2.java:64)
Java Result: 1
BUILD SUCCESSFUL (total time: 38 seconds)

I think g does end up being bigger than maxIndex. I'm getting it figured out. I forgot there were two arrays when I wrote part of the code.