Inheritance & Sorting Question

Question

Hi guys,
I have created an abstract class Element and then three subclasses; Person, Sportsman and Date. The Person class has the fields such as name, surname, DOB ... The Sportsman class is extended Person class with some more fields and Date naturally has days, months and years. My task is to write a class Sort, which contains a few sorting methods (i.e. quicksort) and is able to sort any Element object.
My original idea was to create an abstract method sort. For that method to work, I have to consider three parameters; an instance field the sort will be performed on, a type of sorting algorithm to use and an order of sorting (ascending/descending). The problem I stumbled upon is how to tell the method which instance variable to use; it could be done with a switch statement, but it seems so rough and, well, ugly.
So I'm just wondering if there is a simpler way to do this. Also, if you have a better idea on how to get started with this, please let me know. (I'm not asking for the code, just for the opinion).
Thanks,
Ted

Answer 1

Thank you both for a quick response.
However, I forgot to mention that the sorting should be done without any help of Java library. Also, the main problem I have seems to be on how to "tell" a method which instance field I have chosen.
Example:
Suppose sort(Element e) is an abstract method. I want to sort all the given surnames in the class Person using quicksort in descending order. The method I had in mind should be something like this:
sort(Element, String, int, int)and the call for the metod with the given arguments would be:
sort(e, surname, 1, -1) {
   Person p;
   if (e instanceof Person) {
      p = (Person)e;
   // rest of the code
}But since the argument surname was a String, how to tell a method sort that the field surname was actually chosen?
If my plan does not makes sense, do tell.
Thanks.