Re: References

From:
Paavo Helde <myfirstname@osa.pri.ee>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Sat, 13 Nov 2010 02:39:11 -0600
Message-ID:
<Xns9E2F6C5E81978myfirstnameosapriee@216.196.109.131>
Andrea Crotti <andrea.crotti.0@gmail.com> wrote in
news:m1zkte9gfo.fsf@ip1-201.halifax.rwth-aachen.de:

Paavo Helde <myfirstname@osa.pri.ee> writes:

In your example Packer was a member of Packet. If there are many such
 members then you have to update/notify them all in Packet::setX().
If each Packet has to take some action if x changes, then somebody
will have to tell it that x has changed, right? The simplest way is
to just call some function on each Packet. If they are all similar it
might make sense to derive them all from a common abstract virtual
base class and store a container of base class pointers. In this case
the notification function would loop over the container and call a
virtual function on each object.
 - which would then make the right thing depending on the actual type
 of
the object.


Ah that's interesting, but I didn't really get how to do in practice.
I mean, how do I create a container containing objects of different
type and loop over it?


#include <iostream>
#include <cmath>
#include <vector>
// use a smartpointer for automatic lifetime management.
// a raw pointer would work, but requires more care
#include <boost/smart_ptr.hpp>

class Packet;

class PackerBase {
public:
    virtual void NotifyPacketChanged(Packet& p)=0;
    virtual ~PackerBase() {}
};
typedef boost::shared_ptr<PackerBase> PackerPtr;

class Packet {
private:
    int x_;
    std::vector<PackerPtr> packers_;
private:
    void NotifyPackers() {
        for (size_t i=0; i<packers_.size(); ++i) {
            packers_[i]->NotifyPacketChanged(*this);
        }
    }
public:
     void setX(int x) {
     x_ = x;
     NotifyPackers();
     }
     Packet(int x) : x_(x) {}
     void AddPacker(PackerPtr p) {
     packers_.push_back(p);
     p->NotifyPacketChanged(*this);
     }
     int GetX() const {return x_;}
};

class Packer1: public PackerBase {
private:
    int y_;
private:
    virtual void NotifyPacketChanged(Packet& p) {
        y_ = 2*p.GetX();
        std::cout << "Packer1 set to: " << y_ << "\n";
    }
public:
    Packer1(): y_(0) {}
};

class Packer2: public PackerBase {
private:
    double z_;
private:
    virtual void NotifyPacketChanged(Packet& p) {
        z_ = std::sqrt(double(p.GetX()));
        std::cout << "Packer2 set to: " << z_ << "\n";
    }
public:
    Packer2(): z_(0) {}
};

int main() {
    Packet p1(10);
    p1.AddPacker(PackerPtr(new Packer1()));
    p1.AddPacker(PackerPtr(new Packer2()));
    std::cout << p1.GetX() << std::endl;
    p1.setX(3);
    std::cout << p1.GetX() << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

Output:

Packer1 set to: 20
Packer2 set to: 3.16228
10
Packer1 set to: 6
Packer2 set to: 1.73205
3

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