Frequently, objects in one Tuple are compared to objects in a second Tuple. This is especially true during the sort phase of GroupBy and CoGroup in Cascading Hadoop mode . By default, Hadoop and Cascading use the native Object methods equals() and hashCode() to compare two values and get a consistent hash code for a given value, respectively.

To override this default behavior, you can create a custom java.util.Comparator class to perform comparisons on a given field in a Tuple. For instance, to secondary-sort a collection of custom Person objects in a GroupBy, use the Fields.setComparator() method to designate the custom Comparator to the Fields instance that specifies the sort fields.

Alternatively, you can set a default Comparator to be used by a Flow, or used locally on a given Pipe instance. There are two ways to do this. Call FlowProps.setDefaultTupleElementComparator() on a Properties instance, or use the property key cascading.flow.tuple.element.comparator.

If the hash code must also be customized, the custom Comparator can implement the interface cascading.tuple.Hasher. For more information, see the Javadoc.