[jdom-interest] Cost of List / Element

[Ron Chibnik]

Forgive me if this is a basic question - I couldnt find anything in the
archives. In fact, it may actually be a basic Java question, but here goes.

What is the cost of this type of code (the value of the supplied tag for a
given fund allocation):
	// Get the value for the supplied tag for the supplied fund
	public String getAllocationValue(String fundNum, String tag) {
		LinkedList fundAllocations = (LinkedList)
doc.getRootElement().getChildren(FundAllocation_TAG);
		for (int i=0;i<fundAllocations.size();i++) {
			Element elt = (Element) fundAllocations.get(i);
			if (elt.getChildTextTrim(FundNumber_TAG).equals(fundNum))
				return elt.getChildTextTrim(tag);
		}
		return null;
	}

Do the getChildren() and get(i) methods above create "heavy" elements
(populated w/ a lot of String objects) or simply pointers into the tree? Is
there a better way to do this?

Also, is there a better way to search through a document than this
sequential search? I expect to have the list sorted, so conceivably I could
do a binary search. In most cases my tree is small, so sequential search is
ok (improvements would not be worth additional code) but there could be
times when I have 5000 elements to sift through.

Thanks in advance for your input.