Question

I have Java bean class and I want to sort list of these beans by one bean attribute that is of String type. How can I do that?

Answer 1

Either make the type itself implement Comparable<Foo>, implementing the compareTo method by comparing the two strings, or implement a Comparator<Foo> which again compares by the strings.

With the first approach, you’d then just be able to use Collections.sort() directly; with the second you’d use Collections.sort(collection, new FooComparator());

For example:

public class Foo {
    public String getBar() {
        ...
    }
}

public class FooComparatorByBar implements Comparator<Foo> {
    public int compare(Foo x, Foo y) {
        // TODO: Handle null values of x, y, x.getBar() and y.getBar(),
        // and consider non-ordinal orderings.
        return x.getBar().compareTo(y.getBar());
    }
}