Detecting Inherited Class Type

I've learned that I'm clueless when it comes to search engines because I can never find the information I want so here I am again asking for the help of fellow programmers. The title should say it all -- terrible, I know.

Anyway, I'm new to using STL containers and, having written them off for far too long I've finally realized the error of my ways and have come to appreciate and rely upon the power, simplicity and error prevention that the STL creates for programmers.

To that end, I've been pondering over this question for a bit.

Suppose I have a class, Entity. I create a vector, std::vector<Entity> myVector.

Now suppose that from Entity I've derived two additional Classes, Dog and Cat. I know that I can stuff those into my Entity Vector (I'm aware of slicing issues, suffice it to say that the derivities are purely logic differences in virtual functions).

Assuming that I've correctly initialized everything and populated the list randomly with Cat's and Dog's how, then, would I go about determining which type of derived Entity I'm using (Dog/Cat)? Is there a simple way of saying something like (warning, terrible psuedo code):

Code:

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if(myVector[0] == Dog)
    do this
else if(myVector[0] == Cat)
    do that
else
  barf with some uselessly vague message

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Or is this something I have to manage in a different way?

Thanks for taking the time to read this! Looking forward to some guidance.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by leeor_net

Suppose I have a class, Entity. I create a vector, std::vector<Entity> myVector.

Now suppose that from Entity I've derived two additional Classes, Dog and Cat. I know that I can stuff those into my Entity Vector (I'm aware of slicing issues, suffice it to say that the derivities are purely logic differences in virtual functions).

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Since you want to use polymorphism, and polymorphism in C++ works with pointers and references, you should use a std::vector<Entity*>, std::vector<std::tr1::shared_ptr<Entity> >, or boost::ptr_vector<Entity> instead.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by leeor_net

Assuming that I've correctly initialized everything and populated the list randomly with Cat's and Dog's how, then, would I go about determining which type of derived Entity I'm using (Dog/Cat)?

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You would not go about determining which derived type each object is. Rather, you would just call the virtual functions and let the virtual call mechanism perform the magic of calling the correct function for you, i.e., you would take advantage of polymorphism.

However if you place a base class pointer in the container you will have to do a dynamic cast to specifically call derived functions that are not in the base. This will not be a problem if your derived classes do not expand on the interface of the base.

Anytime you are writing code that tries to make 1 object act as if it is more than 1 or becomes all objects to all parts of the code you are not writing object oriented code. Your pseudo-code is a perfect example of a non-object oriented approach.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bubba

Anytime you are writing code that tries to make 1 object act as if it is more than 1 or becomes all objects to all parts of the code you are not writing object oriented code. Your pseudo-code is a perfect example of a non-object oriented approach.

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To expand on Bubba's comment, designing code this way isn't wrong, it's just not how people typically do it (or recommend) in C++.

Agreed. I'm certainly not saying which is 'right' or 'wrong' just that one approach is object-oriented and one is not.

Thank you for your replies -- always insightful.

For the most part I don't care what kind of object the entity is -- the way I put them together they don't have additional functions, they just overload virtual functions in the base class that determine their behavior, logic and animation.

In this case I was thinking about a special case of an entity in which its behavior is completely different -- e.g., a static object versus a dynamic object (not in the sense of C++ keywords but in the way the environment is set up, static objects never move, they may only animate themselves, dynamic objects move around).

I figured I'd be sticking those special case objects into their own list as they are handled differently by the code that makes use of them (there's never a need to check the movement delta becuase they don't move, instead just call the update() function which does the rest).

Like I stated in my previous post, the psuedo code was terrible. I don't know think it's even possible to write code like that in any language let alone C++. Thanks for the help, I'm pointed in the right direction now!

Actually you can write code like that in C++ using typeid() bit I don't recommend it.

You can also do it using dynamic_cast, which is the better choice usually.

Not shoving things that cannot be used polymorphically into the same container (or hierarchy) sounds quite reasonable.

I'd rather not use typeid() -- I was mostly wondering about handling special cases of an Entity but I think it's easiest to just use a list of a specific type of Entity (in this case it's called a Doodad -- it just sits in one spot looking pretty).