Possible Duplicate of
When should a class be Comparable and/or Comparator?
I understand the difference that is given in this link.
And also in the book that i am referring it is given that we can not use comparable when we need to sort the objects on the basis of more than one fields.
My Question:
I just want an example where we could not possibly use comparable and have to go for comparator in order to compare and please also show that with comparable why can't we compare on two different fields of object. If you find this question as duplicate please provide link,, i have searched many questions but none has the example that i wanted.
If a class implements Comparable, this defines what is usually considered the natural ordering of it elements. In some cases this is the only ordering that may make sense, in other cases it might be the most widely used ordering. If you look for example at numbers, there is probably only one (total) ordering that makes sense (except maybe for taking the reverse). As others already have pointed out, their are other objects that have other useful orderings. What makes the primary ordering (or if there is even one) depends on your application. If you manage persons with adresses in you application, phonebook sort order could be considered the natural order if this is the most widely used one and sorting by age could be a secondary. Slightly OT: Beware of cases where non equal objects are considered equal wrt to the ordering, this may yield problems with containers like OrderedList etc.