Question

I am working on a CS-101 assignment and am only allowed to use a single array. I have an array that looks like the following:

[Song, Song, Album, Fiction, Movie, Nonfiction, Song]

Here is the hierarchy for background (requirements from my assignment):

“At the top level you will have a class called Library. Library will have three subclasses: Music, Book, and Movie. Music will have two subclasses: Song and Album. Book will have two subclasses: Fiction and Nonfiction. Movie, Fiction, Nonfiction, Song,
and Album will not have any subclasses.”

I am currently trying to write a method that will sort the Books by their ISBN number. So Fiction and Nonfiction are subclasses of my Book class, which is a subclass of Library.

I hold everything in Library myLibrary[] = new Library[100];

I’m not sure how to go about retrieving the ISBN’s from the Books only and sort them since I am only allowed one array; otherwise I would love to make an array of Books, then sort those separately.

What are some hints / algorithms that I can utilize to accomplish this?

Update

I can post more code if needed. But this question is currently more focused on the approach.

Answer 1

Without trying to give the actual implementation of the algorithm, you should do an in-place sort where priority can be done by:

1. Books have more priority than Music and Movies

2. If two objects are Books then priority is based on ISBN