Finding all objects that have a given property inside a collection [duplicate]

Answer 1

You can use something like JoSQL, and write 'SQL' against your collections: http://josql.sourceforge.net/

Which sounds like what you want, with the added benefit of being able to do more complicated queries.

Answer 2

Guava has a very powerful searching capabilities when it comes to such type of problems. For example, if your area searching an object based on one of it properties you may consider:

Iterables.tryFind(listOfCats, new Predicate<Cat>(){
    @Override
    boolean apply(@Nullable Cat input) {
        return "tom".equalsIgnoreCase(input.name());
    }
}).or(new Cat("Tom"));

in case it's possible that the Tom cat is not in the listOfCats, it will be returned, thus allowing you to avoid NPE.

Answer 3

With Java 8 lambda expression you can do something like

cats.stream()
    .filter( c -> c.getAge() == 3 && c.getFavoriteFood() == WHISKAS )
    .collect(Collectors.toList());

Conceptually the same as the Guava Predicate approach, but it looks much cleaner with lambda

Probably not a valid answer for OP but worth to note for people with similar need. :)

Answer 4

Again with the commons collections API: You get the "checker" type code when you Implement the Predicate Separately:-

public class CatPredicate implements Predicate {

    private int age; 


    public CatPredicate(int age) {
        super();
        this.age = age;
    }


    @Override
    public boolean evaluate(Object o) {
        Cat c (Cat)o;
        return c.getAge()==this.age;
    }

}

which gets used as :-

CollectionUtils.filter(catCollectionToFilter, new CatPredicate(3))

Answer 5

You could write a method that takes an instance of an interface which defines a check(Cat) method, where that method can be implemented with whatever property-checking you want.

Better yet, make it generic:

public interface Checker<T> {
    public boolean check(T obj);
}

public class CatChecker implements Checker<Cat> {
    public boolean check(Cat cat) {
        return (cat.age == 3); // or whatever, implement your comparison here
    }
}

// put this in some class
public static <T> Collection<T> findAll(Collection<T> coll, Checker<T> chk) {
    LinkedList<T> l = new LinkedList<T>();
    for (T obj : coll) {
         if (chk.check(obj))
             l.add(obj);
    }
    return l;
}

Of course, like other people are saying, this is what relational databases were made for...

Answer 6

You can use lambdaj. Things like these are trivial, the syntax is really smooth:

Person me = new Person("Mario", "Fusco", 35);
Person luca = new Person("Luca", "Marrocco", 29);
Person biagio = new Person("Biagio", "Beatrice", 39);
Person celestino = new Person("Celestino", "Bellone", 29);
List<Person> meAndMyFriends = asList(me, luca, biagio, celestino);
List<Person> oldFriends = filter(having(on(Person.class).getAge(), greaterThan(30)), meAndMyFriends);

and you can do much more complicated things. It uses hamcrest for the Matchers. Some will argue that this is not Java-style, but it's fun how this guy twisted Java to make a bit of functional programming. Have a look at the source code also, it's quite sci-fi.