Thread: organizing linkedlist in ascending order

guys, I have the following method (add), and as I'm adding values to the list I need to order in ascending order based on firstNmae+" "+lastName. I tried using the Collections.sort(students) in the main method, but that doesn't work, besides I need to come up with an implementation that compares new data name to the rest of list names( I think that is the right algorithm)

public class LinkedList {
 
    private Node first;
 
    public LinkedList()
    {
        this.first = null;
    }
 
    //add students to the list
    public void add(Student s)
    {
        Node newNode = new Node(s);
        newNode.next = first;
        first = newNode;  
 
    }
 
    //remove duplicate records (return true if duplicate found)
//    public boolean remove(String fn, String ln)
//    {
//        
//    }
 
    //display list of student
    public void display()
    {
        if(first == null)
            System.out.println("List is empty!");
        else
        {        
            System.out.println(first.value);
            first = first.next;            
        }            
    }
 
}

public class Tester {
 
 
    public static void main(String[] args) {
 
        UnderGrad john = new UnderGrad("john", "doe", 2.7, "computer Science", "phisics");
        UnderGrad jorge = new UnderGrad("jorge", "vazquez", 3.8, "computer Science", "programming");
 
        Advisor jim = new Advisor("jim", "smith");
 
        Grad jane = new Grad("jane", "doe", 3.0, "Electric Engineering", jim);      
 
 
        LinkedList students = new LinkedList();
 
        students.add(john);
        students.add(jorge);
        students.add(jane);      
 
 
        students.display();        
 
 
    }
}

Originally Posted by aussiemcgr

I assume your Student object implements the Comparable object. How did you write your compareTo() method?

forgot to mentioned it... it is implemented in the Person class

//method to compare student names
    public int compareTo(String fn, String ln)
    {
        return this.toString().compareTo(fn+" "+ln);
    }

how could I use this method to compare in the "add" method of the Linkedlist class?

Thanks

Originally Posted by aussiemcgr

Go through the LinkedList, node by node. If node.next is greater than the new node you created, new node's next is equal to node.next and node's next is equal to the new node.

the only way I can use the "compareTo" method I implemented in the student class is if I use like this

public void add(Student s)
    {
        Node newNode = new Node(s);
        newNode.next = first;
        first = newNode; 
        while(first != null)
        {
            if(first.value.compareTo(s.getFname(), s.getLname()) > 0)
            {
 
            }
        }
 
    }

and in this case I'm comparing the fName, lName to the first node that I just created; therefore, they are equal.
the other way of doing it is by comparing the whole toString() which include major gpa and all that stuff

if(first.next.toString().compareTo(newNode.toString()) > 0)

the second would do the comparison, but still the to string contains all other info beside just the firstname and lastname, and I don't think that is the right way, so I'm kind of confuse

you mean that I should have "Comparable" class inside "Student" class that implements a compareTo() method?