Order list of dates in String format

Question

I've got a list which contains x records with dates. The thing is all my dates are in the String format and come as strings from the database. I would really like to order my List by date (in String format) but I really have no clue how to do this.

Without further ado, this is my list, which is a custom list.

List<Finance> finances;

The list contains following fields:

public class Finance {
    private int id;
    private int categoryId;
    private int limitId;
    private double amount;
    private String date;
    private String description;
    }

And this is the dateformat I have (in String): 16/10/2013 15/12/2013 15/11/2013 14/9/2013

How would I be able to sort this custom list by date? I've seen many examples with Collections.sort but I cannot use that because of my custom list type. I've also seen some examples with Comparable but I didn't really understand those..

Could anybody tell me what would be the best way to achieve a chronical order by date of mist list please? I would also like the most lightweighted method, to use as little resources as I can.

EDIT: I still didn't find a working solution (19/12) and still hope for a response here..

Thank you Yenthe

Answer 1

Okay since there where no good answers and barely any responses I decided to dig into it until I fixed it.

The 'easiest' way to come around this is to insert all your dates into the database as yyyy-mm-dd format. For a great explenation on that part you should look here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5733535/2262409

When you place the date in yyyy-mm-dd and just do a order by Date in your SQLite the dates will be ordered correct. When you place them in dd-mm-yyyy they will not be ordered correct.

Long answer short: Solved it in the SQL part. I insert records in the format yyyy-mm-dd I get them by

String selectQuery = "SELECT  * FROM Finance ORDER BY date desc";

And then I reformat them to dd-mm-yyyy right before the user sees it. Example:

String date = String.valueOf(values.get(position).getDate());

// we will format yyyy-mm-dd to dd-mm-yyyy for readability.
//the sql has ordered our dates correctly already.
String firstPartDate = date.substring(8, 10);
String secondPartDate = "/" + date.substring(5,7);
String thirdPartDate = "/" + date.substring(0,4);
String fullCorrectDate = firstPartDate + secondPartDate + thirdPartDate;
Log.i("firstpart", firstPartDate + secondPartDate + thirdPartDate);

dateFinance.setText(fullCorrectDate);