Question

I have set up a test that:

• retrieves data concerning several court cases: each court case is stored in a CourtCase object
• a set of CourtCase objects is then stored in a Map
• I retrieve these data twice (from two different sources) so I end up with two Maps

The data within the objects should be the same between the Maps, but the order of the objects within the Maps may not be:

Map1:
A, case1 – B, case2 – C, case3

Map2:
B, case2 – A, case1 – C, case3

How can I best compare these two Maps?

Answer 1

Map#equals does not care about the order. As long as your 2 maps contain the same mapping it will return true.

Map#equals uses Set#equals method, applied to the entry set. Set#equals contract:

Returns true if the specified object is also a set, the two sets have the same size, and every member of the specified set is contained in this set (or equivalently, every member of this set is contained in the specified set).

Note: this assumes that your CourtCase objects have proper equals and hashcode methods to be compared.