It's a very interesting question, however, there is no dedicated collector to handle such use case.
All you can is to use 3 iterations (Streams) respectively:
List<String> names = employees.stream().map(Emp::name).collect(Collectors.toList());
List<Integer> ids = employees.stream().map(Emp::id).collect(Collectors.toList());
List<Integer> ages = employees.stream().map(Emp::age).collect(Collectors.toList());
Edit - write the own collector: you can use the overloaded method Stream::collect(Supplier, BiConsumer, BiConsumer) to implement your own collector doing what you need:
Map<String, List<Object>> newMap = employees.stream().collect(
HashMap::new, // Supplier of the Map
(map, emp) -> { // BiConsumer accumulator
map.compute("names", remappingFunction(emp.getName()));
map.compute("ages", remappingFunction(emp.getAge()));
map.compute("ids", remappingFunction(emp.getId()));
},
(map1, map2) -> {} // BiConsumer combiner
);
Practically, all it does is extracting the wanted value (name, age...) and adding it to the List under the specific key "names", "ages" etc. using the method Map::compute that allows to compute a new value based on the existing (null by default if the key has not been used).
The remappingFunction that actually creates a new List or adds a value looks like:
private static BiFunction<String, List<Object>, List<Object>> remappingFunction(Object object) {
return (key, list) -> {
if (list == null)
list = new ArrayList<>();
list.add(object);
return list;
};
}
The simplest I could think of is to iterate over the entire list and keep adding to these 3 lists.- This is the simplest way. Do not try to make it unnecessarily complex usingStream.