Java Class that implements Map and keeps insertion order?

If an immutable map fits your needs then there is a library by google called guava (see also guava questions)

Guava provides an ImmutableMap with reliable user-specified iteration order. This ImmutableMap has O(1) performance for containsKey, get. Obviously put and remove are not supported.

ImmutableMap objects are constructed by using either the elegant static convenience methods of() and copyOf() or a Builder object.


I suggest a LinkedHashMap or a TreeMap. A LinkedHashMap keeps the keys in the order they were inserted, while a TreeMap is kept sorted via a Comparator or the natural Comparable ordering of the elements.

Since it doesn't have to keep the elements sorted, LinkedHashMap should be faster for most cases; TreeMap has O(log n) performance for containsKey, get, put, and remove, according to the Javadocs, while LinkedHashMap is O(1) for each.

If your API that only expects a predictable sort order, as opposed to a specific sort order, consider using the interfaces these two classes implement, NavigableMap or SortedMap. This will allow you not to leak specific implementations into your API and switch to either of those specific classes or a completely different implementation at will afterwards.


LinkedHashMap will return the elements in the order they were inserted into the map when you iterate over the keySet(), entrySet() or values() of the map.

Map<String, String> map = new LinkedHashMap<String, String>();

map.put("id", "1");
map.put("name", "rohan");
map.put("age", "26");

for (Map.Entry<String, String> entry : map.entrySet()) {
    System.out.println(entry.getKey() + " = " + entry.getValue());
}

This will print the elements in the order they were put into the map:

id = 1
name = rohan 
age = 26