Question

I am looking to be pointed in the right direction.
I have 1 class Event

class Event{
private:
 vector<string> Question;
 char Mode;// 1 = Ascending 2 = Descending 3 = None
 string EventName;
public:
    Event(string Name){
        EventName = Name;
        SetQuestionSize();
        SetQuestion();
        Mode = 3; 
    }

    void SetName(string NewName){
        EventName = NewName;
    }
    void SetQuestionSize(){
        Question.resize(15);
    }

    int ReturnQuestionSize(){
        return Question.size();
    }

    void SetQuestion(){
        Question[0]="Enter ";
        Question[1]="1 ";
        Question[2]="to ";
        Question[3]="sort ";
        Question[4]="in ";
        Question[5]="ascending ";
        Question[6]="order, ";
        Question[7]="2 ";
        Question[8]="for ";
        Question[9]="Descending, ";
        Question[10]="or ";
        Question[11]="3 ";
        Question[12]="to ";
        Question[13]="ignore ";
        Question[14]=EventName;
    }

    string ReturnQuestion(int Index){
        return Question[Index];
    }

    /*vector<string> ReturnQuestion(){
 return Question;
    }*/

    void SetMode(char NewMode){
 if (NewMode == '0' || NewMode == '1' || NewMode == '2')
 Mode = NewMode;
}

    char ReturnMode(){
 return Mode;
    }

    string ReturnName(){
        return EventName;
    }
};

This is will be a member of a second object, which will use Event’s functions to store data in Event’s members.

The problem I’m having is declaring an array of Event objects in my second object. When researching I came across ways to use an array of pointers to the first object, and some operator ‘->’ that I’m guessing is related to virtual functions.

class WhatTheyWant{
    Event *events[2];
public:
    WhatTheyWant(){
        events[0]= new Event("Miss");
        events[1]= new Event("Dodge");
    }
};

I’m very ignorant about pointers, and I know I will have to learn them eventually, but are they the best way to go or is there a better.

Answer 1

Since your Event class doesn’t have a default constructor, you need to explicitly construct each object with its name, so the way you’re doing it currently is the only way to do it.

If you add a default constructor to Event, you can do it in at least two other ways:

If you will always have a (small) fixed number of objects, you can just declare an array of constant size:

Event events[2];

Doing this will automatically construct the objects when WhatTheyWant is created, so you just need to set the names afterwards:

WhatTheyWant() {
  events[0].SetName("Miss");
  events[1].SetName("Dodge");
}

If you want to have a variable number of events, you can declare a single pointer and dynamically allocate an array of objects:

Event *events;

And you could probably give the number as a parameter to the constructor:

WhatTheyWant(int numEvents) {
  events = new Event[numEvents];
  for (int i = 0; i < numEvents; i++)
    events[i]->SetName("...");
}

---

Also, not directly related to your question, but your Mode variable would be better modeled using an enumeration instead of a char. Using an enum makes it clearer as to what the variable really means, rather than using values like 0, 1 and 2. For example:

public:
  enum ModeType { Ascending, Descending, None };
private:
  ModeType Mode;
public:
  Event() {
    ...
    Mode = Ascending;
  }
  void SetMode(ModeType NewMode) {
    Mode = NewMode;
  }
  ModeType ReturnMode() {
    return Mode;
  }