Virtual Instancing of Derived Class

From:
crjjrc <crjjrc@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Fri, 21 Mar 2008 06:28:10 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<99190c37-6026-4227-9a4b-425560b8e684@m34g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>
Hi. I've got a hierarchy of classes and I'm storing pointers to a mid-
level class Der1 in a vector. These pointers point to a handful of
classes derived from Der1, and Der2 is one such class. Classes below
Der1 implement a virtual function Helper() from the Base class, and
this function is typically called from a base class method
GetInstance(). I'm getting an error from g++ that I don't fully
understand.

The code is:

--------------------------------------------
#include <iostream>
#include <vector>

class Base {
   public:
      virtual Base *GetInstance() {
         std::cout << "in Base::GetInstance()" << std::endl;
         return Helper();
      }
      virtual Base *Helper() = 0;
};

class Der1 : public Base {
   public:
};

class Der2 : public Der1 {
   public:
      Der2 *Helper() {
         std::cout << "in Der2::Helper()" << std::endl;
         return new Der2();
      }
};

int main() {

   Der2 d2;
   Der1 *d1 = &d2;

   std::vector<Der1 *> der1s;

   der1s.push_back(d1->GetInstance());

   return 0;

}
--------------------------------------------

On compiling, g++ tells me:

woo.cpp: In function 'int main()':
woo.cpp:32: error: invalid conversion from 'Base*' to 'Der1*'
woo.cpp:32: error: initializing argument 1 of 'void std::vector<_Tp,
_Alloc>::push_back(const _Tp&) [with _Tp = Der1*, _Alloc =
std::allocator<Der1*>]'

It seems that the return value of Der2::Helper() is implicitly cast
from Der2 * to Base * by Base::GetInstance(). In order to fix this,
it seems I have to use dynamic_cast:

   der1s.push_back(dynamic_cast<Der1 *>(d1->GetInstance()));

Is this the correct diagnosis and a suitable solution to this problem?

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