Re: Derived class & Function pointer

From:
mast4as <mast4as@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Tue, 15 Sep 2009 01:42:50 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<efc76bcb-55bf-459a-a1ba-2b5af0bbd3d9@j19g2000vbp.googlegroups.com>
On Sep 14, 7:25 pm, "Bo Persson" <b...@gmb.dk> wrote:

mast4as wrote:

Hi everyone

I have a problem that many people probably came across before but I
didn't find an answer on the net yet ...

I have a base class Bass and 2 derived class DerivedA & DerivedB. I
can create an new instance of the DeriveA class but then need to
call a method of the DerivedB class to save the data of the base
class into a specific file format. So I thought of using function
pointer but can seem to figure it out:

class Base
{
public:
  float *data;
 Base() { data = new float[10]; }
 ~Base() { delete [] data; }
 virtual void SaveFormat() = 0;
}

class DerivedA : public Base
{
public:
 void SaveFormat() { // save data in file format A }
}

class DerivedB : public Base
{
public:
 void SaveFormat() { // save data in file format B }
}

int main()
{
 Base *derivedA = new Derived A;
 // now I want to save the data hold in derivedA but by using
SaveFormat from DerivedB ???
 ????
 // this is where I am lost... I tried
 void (Base::*SaveFormatPtrFunc)() = &DerivedB::SaveFormat;
 derivedA->*SaveFormatPtrFunc();
 // but that doesn't compile ;-(
}

Does anybody know what's the best way of doing this ?


Not this way for sure. :-)

If you want different ways to save the data, without the format being
tied to the actual type of the objects, why make them members in the
first place?

What about a couple of free functions?

void SaveFormatA(const Base&);
void SaveFormatB(const Base&);

If you still need the virtual functions for a default save format,
these can call the free function of their choice, like

void DerivedA::SaveFormat()
{ SaveFormatA(*this); }

Bo Persson


Thanks everyone for your answer. Well I agree the design was ugly
which why I hoped you could give me some better ways of doing this ;-)
I made the Save method part of the class because each class uses
different ways of encoding the data and therefore I have also methods
in each of these classes that allow me to compress/decompress the data
according to the file format description.

The code from Victor obviously works fine but the DerivedA/B classes
don't only have methods to save the data, but of course also to read
the files and store the data into m_data from the base class (or
something of that kind). I also wanted to avoid having to create Temp
instances (such as in the example given by Victor where you need to
create sa sb).

Anyway I will digest some of the things you said and will go with a
simpler solution.

Thanks for your help -c

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