Java Stream – Get Object with Max Date From a List

Learn to get an object with the latest date (max date) from a Stream of custom objects. We will use a custom Comparator for comparing the Date values stored in the custom objects.

This example uses Employee class. We will create a program to get the youngest employee in a list of employees.

1. Custom Comparator for Comparing Objects by Date

The LocalDate() implements the Comparable interface so it automatically supports the correct comparison logic for comparing the two LocalDate objects. We do not need to write our own comparison logic for this date comparison.

We need to write a custom Comparator that can compare the custom objects and compare their LocalDate value.

The given Comparator compares two given Employee objects by their age i.e. Date of birth.

Comparator<Employee> employeeAgeComparator = Comparator
                .comparing(Employee::getDateOfBirth);

Use Comparator.reversed() method, we need to find the Min Date from the Stream.

2. Getting Object with Max date using Stream.max()

Now we know what to compare, let us create a program to create a stream of Employee Objects and then pass the custom Comparator to the Stream.max() method.

import java.time.LocalDate;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Comparator;
import java.util.List;
 
public class MaxDateExample 
{
    public static void main(final String[] args) 
    {
        Comparator<Employee> employeeAgeComparator = Comparator
                            .comparing(Employee::getDateOfBirth);
 
        Employee youngestEmployee = getEmployeeList().stream()
                                    .max(employeeAgeComparator)
                                    .get();
 
        System.out.println(youngestEmployee); //Prints Employee 'D'
    }
 
    private static List<Employee> getEmployeeList() 
    {
        List<Employee> empList = new ArrayList<>();
        empList.add(new Employee(1, "A", LocalDate.of(1991, 1, 1), 30000));
        empList.add(new Employee(2, "B", LocalDate.of(1976, 7, 9), 30000));
        empList.add(new Employee(3, "C", LocalDate.of(1992, 8, 1), 50000));
        empList.add(new Employee(4, "D", LocalDate.of(2001, 3, 11), 50000));
        return empList;
    }
}

Program Output:

Employee [id=4, name=D, dateOfBirth=2001-03-11, salary=50000.0]

In this way, we can get a custom object from a List of objects while comparing the date values from one of its fields.

Happy Learning !!

Sourcecode on Github