The list object returned by calling the toArray() function is not modifiable.

E.g.

Collections.sort(values, myCustomSorter);
List<DBObject> values = cursor.toArray();

Causes an unsupported operation exception:

Caused by: java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException
at java.util.Collections$UnmodifiableList$1.set(Collections.java:1186)
at java.util.Collections.sort(Collections.java:163)

The source for DBCursor shows:

Collections.unmodifiableList( _all );

Why is this list unmodifiable? I want to sot my data in the application layer instead of taxing Mongo with this.