Sort ArrayList of custom Objects by property

0 votes

I read about sorting ArrayLists using a Comparator but in all of the examples people used compareTo which according to some research is a method for Strings.

I wanted to sort an ArrayList of custom objects by one of their properties: a Date object (getStartDay()). Normally I compare them by item1.getStartDate().before(item2.getStartDate()) so I was wondering whether I could write something like:

public class CustomComparator {
    public boolean compare(Object object1, Object object2) {
        return object1.getStartDate().before(object2.getStartDate());
    }
}

public class RandomName {
    ...
    Collections.sort(Database.arrayList, new CustomComparator);
    ...
}
Dec 22, 2020 in Java by Roshni
• 10,520 points
1,212 views

1 answer to this question.

0 votes

Since Date implements Comparable, it has a compareTo method just like String does.

So your custom Comparator could look like this:

public class CustomComparator implements Comparator<MyObject> {
    @Override
    public int compare(MyObject o1, MyObject o2) {
        return o1.getStartDate().compareTo(o2.getStartDate());
    }
}

The compare() method must return an int, so you couldn't directly return a boolean like you were planning to anyway.

Your sorting code would be just about like you wrote:

Collections.sort(Database.arrayList, new CustomComparator());

A slightly shorter way to write all this, if you don't need to reuse your comparator, is to write it as an inline anonymous class:

Collections.sort(Database.arrayList, new Comparator<MyObject>() {
    @Override
    public int compare(MyObject o1, MyObject o2) {
        return o1.getStartDate().compareTo(o2.getStartDate());
    }
});
answered Dec 22, 2020 by Gitika
• 65,910 points

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