Re: Deriving my own stream class

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Wed, 18 Jun 2008 01:09:46 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<9806a22e-d504-4406-8339-4fb2c9a5db3f@m45g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>
On Jun 17, 3:22 pm, Dan Smithers <dsmith...@talktalk.net> wrote:

kasthurirangan.bal...@gmail.com wrote:


    [...]

Also, you may want to replace this
template <typename charT, typename Traits=std::char_traits<charT> >

with

template <typename charT, class Traits=std::char_traits<charT> >


I thought that class and typename were synonymous in this context.


They are. A lot of experts (but not all) prefer using typename
systematically in this case, to avoid confusion.

I didn't get why would want to write another stream for char
when its already available.


The reason why I'm doing this is that I have a log class that
opens a file and sends a string together with time information
to it.


That's easily done using a forwarding streambuf, see
http://kanze.james.neuf.fr/articles/fltrsbf1.html. More
generally, it is often desirable to make logging configurable,
etc., which often leads to a wrapper (not derivation) around
ostream; there's a generic implementation of this in the code at
my site (along with full implementations of output and input
filtering streambuf): go to the code section, then look up
OutputStreamWrapper in the IO subsection.

My initial implementation used a method log(const
string& msg) to do this, but that means that I have to
pre-format the string.

ostringstream oss;
oss << "log message" << log_val ...;
my_log(oss.str());

If I make my log class inherit from ostream then I can simply write

my_log << "log_message" << log_val ...;


You can do that with a wrapper as well. And if all you need is
the time stamp, a filtering streambuf means that you're using an
istream; you don't need to inherit (or if you do, it's only to
provide convenience constructors).

I thought that while I was doing this I would set up a
manipulator so that I can writethings like
my_log << setformat(Error) << "error message" << err_code;

my_log << setformat(Warning) << "warning message << warning_data;


This is most often handled by something like:

    log( Log::error ) << "message" ... ;
    log( Log::warning ) << "message" ... ;

The function "log" determines whether logging at this level is
active or not, and returns a corresponding OutputStreamWrapper.

Note that the destructor of the OutputStreamWrapper here can be
used to force a flush (and ensure that every log message ends
with a new line, if it collaborates with the filtering
streambuf), and the class itself can also grab a lock in its
constructor, and release it in the destructor, to ensure
synchronization in a multi-threaded environment.

--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
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