Re: What is the name of this pattern?

From:
Mike Reed <mike.reed10@googlemail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:14:48 CST
Message-ID:
<2361fa85-ead2-4fdc-8288-546f517fd754@s31g2000yqs.googlegroups.com>
On 22 July, 19:07, Mike Reed <mike.ree...@googlemail.com> wrote:

Hi,
I'm just documenting some of my code and I cannot remember the name of
a pattern I have used. It allows a class to hold a collection of
objects of undefined types as long as they provide the correct
interface, and performs actions on those objects. However, the code
that performs the actions is template free and hence can be in a
separately compilable implementation file. Here is the code in the
simplest form I could get it:

#include <iostream>
#include <list>

class Processor
{
public:
    void process()
    {
        for(Clients::iterator i = clients_.begin(); i != clients_.end
(); ++i)
            (*i)->foo();
    }

    template <class T>
    void addClient(T& t)
    {
        clients_.push_back(new ClientHolder<T>(t));
    }

private:
    struct ClientBase
    {
        // The interface clients must provide
        virtual void foo() = 0;
    };

    template <class T>
    struct ClientHolder : public ClientBase
    {
        ClientHolder(T& t) : t_(t) {}
        void foo()
        {
            t_.foo();
        }
        T& t_;
    };

    typedef std::list<ClientBase*> Clients;
    Clients clients_;

};

struct X {void foo() { std::cout << "X\n"; }};
struct Y {void foo() { std::cout << "Y\n"; }};
struct Z {void foo() { std::cout << "Z\n"; }};

int
main()
{
    Processor p;
    X x;
    Y y;
    Z z;
    p.addClient(x);
    p.addClient(y);
    p.addClient(z);
    p.process();

    return 0;

}

Note the Processor::process() is not templated and so can go in a
separate implementation file. I can't remember where in my memory I
got this pattern from. Does it have a name?


{ quoted sig & banner removed. don't quote extraneous material. tia., -mod }

Hi,
An update to my original post.
As I said this post was based on code I wrote a while ago and I must
admit that even I had forgotten what this was trying to achieve,
sorry. It is now clear to me that the main aim here is not about
hiding implementation, although that is a beneficial side effect. The
main aim here is allowing a single object (of type Processor in this
case) to call methods on a collection of objects of unknown type but
that provide a specified interface, much like duck typing.

My actual code was a graph widget. Clients could add a plot to the
graph by giving the graph a reference to an object that "looked like"
a std::map<double,double>. To plot something you could just put it in
a std::map<double,double> and add it to the map. But if you already
had a class that contained data you wanted to plot you just had to
define a const_iterator for your class that dereferenced to pairs of
doubles and, voila, you could add that to the graph too.

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