Hi,

I have a design problem and would like to get some feedback on a way to achieve a reasonably optimal solution to the problem.

I have a object commission which is used by several other classes as an aggregation. i.e several classes have a linked list of commision object called newcommisions. now some classes call collections.sort on newcommisions before working on them.  The commision obejct implements comparable and overrides compareto() function to achieve a specific result.

now after sorting if two obejcts a,b  are equal I want to add the commision amount of b to the commision amount of a and remove b from the list. That is I want a list of unique commision objects in which the commision amount of duplicate objects have been added.

How can I achieve this? I was thinking of putting a check in compareto() function to check whether the commision object has a particular parent and if so it can call another function which will add the two commisions.

Bur this will result in mesing up the sorting functionality of collections.sort for the other classes that dont need this behaviour of adding commisions.

The other way is to add another function call after the sort, that will go through the Linked list again and remove any duplicate commisions and add  their commision amount into the new one.

Hope my explanation made sense. PLease feel free to suggest any other approach. I can not paste the code though.