Question

I am wrapping a library which I did not write to make it more user friendly. There are a huge number of functions which are very basic so it’s not ideal to have to wrap all of these when all that is really required is type conversion of the results.

A contrived example:

Say the library has a class QueryService, it has among others this method:

WeirdInt getId() const;

I’d like a standard int in my interface however, I can get an int out of WeirdInt no problem as I know how to do this. In this case lets say that WeirdInt has:

int getValue() const;

This is a very simple example, often the type conversion is more complicated and not always just a call to getValue().

There are literally hundreds of function calls that return types likes these and more are added all the time, so I’d like to try and reduce the burden on myself having to constantly add a bajillion methods every time the library does just to turn WeirdType into type.

I want to end up with a QueryServiceWrapper which has all the same functionality as QueryService, but where I’ve converted the types. Am I going to have to write an identically names method to wrap every method in QueryService? Or is there some magic I’m missing? There is a bit more to it as well, but not relevant to this question.

Thanks

Answer 1

If the wrapper methods for QueryService have a simple pattern, you could also think of generating QueryServiceWrapper with some perl or python script, using some heuristics. Then you need to define some input parameters at most.

Even defining some macros would help in writing this wrapper class.