Is the OpenG Dictionary ordered?

[ccarner]

Are items entered into the dictionary kept in order of insertion, ordered by key, or unordered? If I call Dictionary Get Items.vi, in what order does the dictionary return the items?

[Jim Kring]

There isn't a spec for this, currently. But, I think that they are ordered by order of insertion. There has been talk of refactoring the current implementation, at some point, with variant attributes, since they are more performant.

[Yair]

Expanding on Jim's reply, you might wish to just use variant attributes directly for your dictionary. The API isn't exactly the same, but you can use them to do pretty much everything that the library does and they're generally easier and faster to use. The main difference is probably that the container (the variant) is by-val and not by-ref.

 

Regarding your specific question, in the VA case this is done by calling the get primitive without a name. I don't know what the order is (it might be insertion, it might be alphabetical, it might be based on the balancing of the tree). It should be easy enough to check.