Pecunia's Place

Implementing IComparable

In the most recent project I’m working on at work, we’re using a self-made generator for generating the business entities. The generator creates the class, properties, and implements the IComparable interface.

IComparable contains a CompareTo() method that should return 0 when the objects are equal, a negative value if the current object is less than the other, and positive if the current object is greater than the other.

A generated class looks like this:

public class SomeObject
{
    ... properties ...
    public int CompareTo(SomeObject other)
    {
        if (Id = = other.Id &&
            Name = = other.Name &&
            SomeProperty = = other.SomeProperty &&
            SomeOtherProperty = = other.SomeOtherProperty)
            return 0;
        else
            return 1;
    }
}

It’s a good thing the business entities are not actually compared to each other, but only checked for equality. Sorting these objects will be a downright failure…