Java error: Comparison method violates its general contract

Question

I saw many questions about this, and tried to solve the problem, but after one hour of googling and a lots of trial & error, I still can\'t fix it. I hope some of you ca

Answer 1

The exception message is actually pretty descriptive. The contract it mentions is transitivity: if A > B and B > C then for any A, B and C: A > C. I checked it with paper and pencil and your code seems to have few holes:

if (card1.getRarity() < card2.getRarity()) {
  return 1;

you do not return -1 if card1.getRarity() > card2.getRarity().

---

if (card1.getId() == card2.getId()) {
  //...
}
return -1;

You return -1 if ids aren't equal. You should return -1 or 1 depending on which id was bigger.

---

Take a look at this. Apart from being much more readable, I think it should actually work:

if (card1.getSet() > card2.getSet()) {
    return 1;
}
if (card1.getSet() < card2.getSet()) {
    return -1;
};
if (card1.getRarity() < card2.getRarity()) {
    return 1;
}
if (card1.getRarity() > card2.getRarity()) {
    return -1;
}
if (card1.getId() > card2.getId()) {
    return 1;
}
if (card1.getId() < card2.getId()) {
    return -1;
}
return cardType - item.getCardType();  //watch out for overflow!

Answer 2

It might also be an OpenJDK bug... (not in this case but it is the same error)

If somebody like me stumbles upon this answer regarding the

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Comparison method violates its general contract!

then it might also be a bug in the Java-Version. I have a compareTo running since several years now in some applications. But suddenly it stopped working and throws the error after all compares were done (i compare 6 Attributes before returning "0").

Now I just found this Bugreport of OpenJDK:

• JDK-8210311
• Affects Version/s: 8, 11
• Fix Version/s: 12
• https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8210311

Answer 3

I had the same symptom. For me it turned out that another thread was modifying the compared objects while the sorting was happening in a Stream. To resolve the issue, I mapped the objects to immutable temporary objects, collected the Stream to a temporary Collection and did the sorting on that.

Answer 4

Consider the following case:

First, o1.compareTo(o2) is called. card1.getSet() == card2.getSet() happens to be true and so is card1.getRarity() < card2.getRarity(), so you return 1.

Then, o2.compareTo(o1) is called. Again, card1.getSet() == card2.getSet() is true. Then, you skip to the following else, then card1.getId() == card2.getId() happens to be true, and so is cardType > item.getCardType(). You return 1 again.

From that, o1 > o2, and o2 > o1. You broke the contract.