4.5 Downcasting

A question that has arisen several times is, "If I have a base class pointer (Ptr) to an object and I want the derived class pointer, should I downcast (via C++ dynamic cast) to get the derived pointer, or should I use the object aggregation system to GetObject<> () to find a Ptr to the interface to the subclass API?"

The answer to this is that in many situations, both techniques will work. ns-3 provides a templated function for making the syntax of Object dynamic casting much more user friendly:

template <typename T1, typename T2>
Ptr<T1>
DynamicCast (Ptr<T2> const&p)
{
  return Ptr<T1> (dynamic_cast<T1 *> (PeekPointer (p)));
}

DynamicCast works when the programmer has a base type pointer and is testing against a subclass pointer. GetObject works when looking for different objects aggregated, but also works with subclasses, in the same way as DynamicCast. If unsure, the programmer should use GetObject, as it works in all cases. If the programmer knows the class hierarchy of the object under consideration, it is more direct to just use DynamicCast.

This document was generated on April 21, 2010 using texi2html 1.82.