Thread: Sorting Formatted Numbers In JTable

Ok, well I have a JTable with several different types of text in each column and I would like to know how to specify how to sort each column. Some of the text is just text, some are numbers, and some are formatted numbers. At the moment, it is obviously treating each column as Strings, so it is just sorting based on the text-equivalent of each cell of data.

So, here is the outline of the cells, 2 examples of their data, and how I want to sort them (column numbers are in indexes):

Column 2:
Type: Double, only positive numbers
Example 1: 150
Example 2: 1,000.25
Sort Goal: Numerically

Column 3:
Type: String containing a double and an int, only positive numbers
Example 1: 1,098/1,098
Example 2: 29.15/150
Sort Goal: Numerically by the number after the slash

Column 4:
Type: String, representing a percentage, only positive percentage
Example 1: 100%
Example 2: 15%
Sort Goal: Numerically

Column 5:
Type: Double, can be negative or positive
Example 1: 27,110.13
Example 2: -289.74
Sort Goal: Numerically


Here is my code of giving the ability to sort:

RowSorter<TableModel> sorter = new TableRowSorter<TableModel>(model);
table.setRowSorter(sorter);

I've been trying to do several things, but I just don't understand enough about how the TableRowSorter works in order for me to break some ground here. Can anyone give me some guidance as to how to specify how I want the rows to be sorted?

You need to override the method getColumnClass() in your table model class (extends from AbstractTableModel).
This method returns Class type for each column, so the TableRowSorter will sort columns accordingly.

The following example will make the table sorts the 1st column as number (Integer.class) and other columns as String (String.class)

    public Class getColumnClass(int column) {
        if (column == 1) {
            return Integer.class;
        } else {
            return String.class;
        }
    }

immutable objects