Alphabetic order of an array of a Class

Question

I have an array of Class Customer. I would like to alphabetically re-order the elements in the array of Class Customer based on a field called name.

Here is the code I am using:

int j;
        boolean flag = true;  // will determine when the sort is finished
        Customer temp;
        while ( flag )
        {
            flag = false;
            for ( j = 0;  j < count_customers;  j++ )
            {

                if ( customers[ j ].getName().toString().compareToIgnoreCase( customers[ j + 1 ].getName().toString() ) > 0 )
                {
                    temp = customers[ j ];
                    customers[ j ] = customers[ j+1 ];     // swapping
                    customers[ j+1 ] = temp; 
                    flag = true;
                 } 
             } 
         } 

customers[] is the array that holds Customer count_customers represents the number of active customers. for some reason when I run the code below returns nothing:

        for(int i=0; i < count_customers; i++)
        {
            tmp_results += customers[ i ].toString() + "\n";
        }

.toString() is defined in Customer class, it just prints everything about the customer out.

So what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Create a new class CustomerComparator and sort your Customer[] using Arrays.sort(array, new CustomerComparator());

public class CustomerComparator implements Comparator<Customer> {

    @Override
    public int compare(Customer c1, Customer c2) {
        return c1.getName().compareTo(c2.getName());
    }

}