ordered trade route city list

[jottyfan]

Creating trade routes becomes a mess when you have multiple colonies. Then, the order is done as it comes from the game (I suggest creation date). Try to find your colony when you have so many ones.

I've found a solution for this by the patch provided. This is obviously not the way how freecol is developed, but it works without a performance issue.

Not sure, but I think there might be plans to allow multiple ordering ways. Best was to have a filterable search input field instead such as select2 (https://select2.org/getting-started/basic-usage/). Then, the order of colonies would not matter any more.

The quick fix for ordering alphabetically by colony name is in TradeRouteInputPanel.

diff --git a/src/net/sf/freecol/client/gui/panel/TradeRouteInputPanel.java b/src/net/sf/freecol/client/gui/panel/TradeRouteInputPanel.java
index 5bb5180..e55fd30 100644
--- a/src/net/sf/freecol/client/gui/panel/TradeRouteInputPanel.java
+++ b/src/net/sf/freecol/client/gui/panel/TradeRouteInputPanel.java
@@ -518,7 +519,9 @@
         if (player.getEurope() != null) {
             this.destinationSelector.addItem(player.getEurope().getId());
         }
-        for (Colony colony : player.getColonyList()) {
+        List<Colony> sortedColonies = new ArrayList<>(player.getColonyList());
+        sortedColonies.sort((a, b) -> a == null || b == null || a.getName() == null ? 0 : a.getName().compareTo(b.getName()));
+        for (Colony colony : sortedColonies) {
             this.destinationSelector.addItem(colony.getId());
         }

Not sure if this can be added to the source code until another solution is implemented. But for me, it works very well.