Question

I am making a class which inherits off another and must return the value of a function in the base class… It is confusing so I will let the code speak for itself…

class ParentClass {
public:
    virtual bool getMyVal();
};

bool ParentClass::getMyVal() {
    return true;   // in my program there is a bit more to it
}

class ChildClass : public ParentClass {
public:
    bool getMyVal();
};

bool ChildClass::getMyVal() {
    CalculateMassOfSun();

    return parent::getMyVal();    // Please make sure you read below...
}

So this is just an example of what I want to do, not the actual code. As you can see, in ChildClass::getMyVal(), is basically needs to do some pre-computation then run the same function in the parent class and return its value. I know that it is a virtual function in the parent, and that I have not gone about invoking the function in the parent the right way – it is how it is done in PHP and the only way I can think of that makes sense to me and hopefully others at the moment.

So how would I go about doing this? At the moment, I have found something along the lines of:

bool ChildClass::getMyVal() : /*ParentClass::*/getMyVal() { ... }

however it does not return the value here.

Thanks in advance for your responses.

Answer 1

To invoke the base definition of getMyVal just prefix the call with the base type name

return ParentClass::getMyVal();