How do I use Comparator to define a custom sort order?

Question

I want to develop a sorting demo for car list. I am using data table to display car list. Now actually I want to sort the list by car color. Here it is not sort by alphabeti

Answer 1

I had to do something similar to Sean and ilalex's answer.
But I had too many options to explicitly define the sort order for and only needed to float certain entries to the front of the list ... in the specified (non-natural) order.
Hopefully this is helpful to someone else.

public class CarComparator implements Comparator {

    //sort these items in this order to the front of the list 
    private static List ORDER = Arrays.asList("dd", "aa", "cc", "bb");

    public int compare(final Car o1, final Car o2) {
        int result = 0;
        int o1Index = ORDER.indexOf(o1.getName());
        int o2Index = ORDER.indexOf(o2.getName());
        //if neither are found in the order list, then do natural sort
        //if only one is found in the order list, float it above the other
        //if both are found in the order list, then do the index compare
        if (o1Index < 0 && o2Index < 0) result = o1.getName().compareTo(o2.getName());
        else if (o1Index < 0) result = 1;
        else if (o2Index < 0) result = -1;
        else result = o1Index - o2Index;
        return result;
    }

//Testing output: dd,aa,aa,cc,bb,bb,bb,a,aaa,ac,ac,ba,bd,ca,cb,cb,cd,da,db,dc,zz
}