Compare two Java Collections using Comparator instead of equals()

Question

Problem Statement

I have two Collections of the same type of object that I want to compare. In this case, I want to compare them based on an attribute that does not factor into equals() for the Objects. In my example, I'm using ranked collections of Names for instance:

public class Name {
    private String name;
    private int weightedRank;

    //getters & setters

    @Override
    public boolean equals(Object obj) {
        return this.name.equals(obj.name); //Naive implementation just to show
                                           //equals is based on the name field.
    }
}

I want to compare the two Collections to assert that, for position i in each Collection, the weightedRank of each Name at that position is the same value. I did some Googling but didn't find a suitable method in Commons Collections or any other API so I came up with the following:

public <T> boolean comparatorEquals(Collection<T> col1, Collection<T> col2,
        Comparator<T> c)
{
    if (col1 == null)
        return col2 == null;
    if (col2 == null) 
        return false;

    if (col1.size() != col2.size())
        return false;

    Iterator<T> i1 = col1.iterator(), i2 = col2.iterator();

    while(i1.hasNext() && i2.hasNext()) {
        if (c.compare(i1.next(), i2.next()) != 0) {
            return false;
        }
    }

    return true;
}

Question

Is there another way to do this? Did I miss an obvious method from Commons Collections?

Related

I also spotted this question on SO which is similar though in that case I'm thinking overriding equals() makes a little more sense.

Edit

Something very similar to this will be going into a release of Apache Commons Collections in the near future (at the time of this writing). See https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COLLECTIONS-446.

Answer 1

You could use the Guava Equivalence class in order to decouple the notions of "comparing" and "equivalence". You would still have to write your comparing method (AFAIK Guava does not have it) that accepts an Equivalence subclass instead of the Comparator, but at least your code would be less confusing, and you could compare your collections based on any equivalence criteria.

Using a collection of equivance-wrapped objects (see the wrap method in Equivalence) would be similar to the Adapter-based solution proposed by sharakan, but the equivalence implementation would be decoupled from the adapter implementation, allowing you to easily use multiple Equivalence criteria.