Thread: Class inheritance and method issues

Originally Posted by Khabz

The main issue is I need to use a method which solely belongs to class B and apply it to "vec" elements.

The method is only to be applied on elements of the vector created by the following way: A* obj = new B(), which means that only B objects are subject to this method and therefore using shouldn't be illegal.

Is there any way I can solve the issue explained above?

There are a few options. For example, you could use a vector<B*> instead of a vector<A*>. Of course, this means that you can't have A objects, but then if you "need to use a method which solely belongs to class B", then you can't have A objects anyway, unless...

... you only "need to use a method which solely belongs to class B" for those objects that are of B, but not A. In that case, you can consider: should the member function actually be in the interface of A instead of only of B? Maybe it does logically belong in A, but is a virtual function that does nothing.

If absolutely necessary, there's another option: use dynamic_cast to determine if the pointer to A actually points to a B object, and if so, call the member function specific to B. However, this basically means that you've given up on using polymorphism and are just querying objects to figure out if you can call a member function.