Replacing HashMap with TreeMap - dictionary

Question

I am trying to replace HashMap used in my code to TreeMap as I need to have the keys sorted.
But just replacing the HashMap declaration with TreeMap is running into various ClassCast exception which were not arising before. I am debugging the code but I cannot follow why is it failing? It fails in the treemap.put(key, value); statement.
private static void insertIntoIndexFile(String datatype, String value, String columnName, String tableName,
long offset) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
Map<Object, ArrayList<Long>> index = new TreeMap<Object, ArrayList<Long>>();
Map<Object, ArrayList<Long>> result = new TreeMap<Object, ArrayList<Long>>();
try{
String indexTableFileName = SCHEMA+"."+tableName+"."+columnName+".ndx";
File indexTableFileObject = new File(indexTableFileName);
long indexfileLength = indexTableFileObject.length();
RandomAccessFile indexTableFile = new RandomAccessFile(indexTableFileObject, "rw");
boolean isValuePresent = false;
if(indexfileLength>0){
// returns sucessfully
index = getIndexFileEntries(indexTableFileName, datatype);
// checking if the key exists
Set set1 = index.entrySet();
Iterator iterator1 = set1.iterator();
while(iterator1.hasNext()) {
Map.Entry me2 = (Map.Entry)iterator1.next();
Object key = me2.getKey();
ArrayList<Long> temp = new ArrayList<Long>();
if(key.toString().equals(value)){
System.out.println("Comparing the hashmap value to value " + key.toString());
isValuePresent = true;
temp = (ArrayList<Long>) me2.getValue();
long frequency = temp.get(0);
frequency++;
temp.set(0, frequency);
temp.add(offset);
index.put(key, temp);
break;
}
}
if(isValuePresent == false){
System.out.println("The file has values but this key was not found. Here is the updated hashmap");
ArrayList<Long> temp = new ArrayList<Long>();
temp.add(Long.parseLong("01"));
temp.add(offset);
Object key = (Object)value;
index.put(key,temp); // this line throws error
writeMapToIndexFile(tableName, columnName, datatype, index);
}else{
writeMapToIndexFile(tableName,columnName, datatype, index);
}
}catch(Exception e){
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
Here is the stacktrace :
java.lang.ClassCastException: java.lang.Long cannot be cast to java.lang.String
at java.lang.String.compareTo(Unknown Source)
at java.util.TreeMap.put(Unknown Source)
at Database.insertIntoIndexFile(Database.java:433)
at Database.insertIntoTable(Database.java:369)
at Database.main(Database.java:1340)
Similar stacktrace for each of short, integer etc. I expect the key to be these datatypes. Therefore I have used Object type to store the keys. But I am not trying to cast them String before inserting into the map.
Is there anything that I am overlooking while replacing a hashmap with treemap. I agree its a very broad question but any help would really be great.
Thanks for your time.