[Interest] Best practice for sorting multiple (connected) QLists

[Joshua Grauman]

I fairly often find myself wanting to sort a bit of data. Imagine I have a 
few QList<int>'s a QStringList's and that they correspond like a database 
table so that I always append to all the lists together with data for one 
row. Something like:

QList<int> age, height;
QStringList firstname, lastname;
while(data)
{
    age.append(getData1());
    height.append(getData2());
    firstname.append(getData3());
    lastname.append(getData4());
}

Now what if I want to sort all that data, (say by age) so that I can print 
out all the first and last names in order according to age.

I've tried different ways of doing this, but they all seem a bit 
contrived. The best I've come up with is to have another QMap<int, int> 
that maps the sorting order to the indices like:

QList<int> age, height;
QStringList firstname, lastname;
QMap<int, int> order;
while(data)
{
    age.append(getData1());
    height.append(getData2());
    firstname.append(getData3());
    lastname.append(getData4());
    order[age.last()] = age.size()-1;
}

QList<int> orderedIndices = order.values();

for(int i=0; i<orderedIndices.size(); i++)
{
   print(firstname[orderedIndices[i]], lastname[orderedIndices[i]]);
}

It's not too bad. I'm not worried about performance, most of the time 
these are just small amounts of data that don't warrant creating a new 
class to handle, or creating a database for. I'm just wondering if anyone 
has a cleaner way of handling this? What do you do for these types of 
situations?

Josh