Question

I hate to ask for help on such a common error but I’ve been staring and prodding at my code for two hours trying to find what the compiler says is a missing semi-colon and unspecified type:

error C2146: syntax error : missing ‘;’ before identifier ‘history’…..:
error C4430:
missing type specifier – int assumed. Note: C++ does not support
default-int 1>c:\users\alex\dropbox\lab4\lab4\lab4\customer.h(49):
error C4430: missing type specifier – int assumed. Note: C++ does not
support default-int

#pragma once

#include <string>
using std::string;
#include "customerdata.h"
#include "rentalhistory.h"
#include "item.h"
#include "customer.h"
/*---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Purpose: class Customer contains methods to grab information about a customer, 
such as their id number, address, phone number (stored in class CustomerData). 
It also contains methods that will allow access to information about a 
customer’s rental history (stored in class RentalHistory).

CONSTRUCTION:
(1) empty construction. (2) name and id (3) with information provided by
CustomerData object.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- */
class Customer
{
public:
    Customer();
    Customer( const Customer & );
    Customer( string, string, int );
    Customer( const CustomerData & );
    ~Customer();

    // get customer's first name.
    string getFirstName() const;

    // get customer's last name.
    string getLastName() const;

    // get customer's id number
    int getIdNum() const;

    // add a movie to customer's rental history
    void addMovie( Item *&, string code );

    // checks to see if it is a valid customer
    bool isValidCustomer();

    // prints the customer's rental history
    void printHistory() const;

    Customer & operator=( Customer &rhs );


private:
    CustomerData data;  // object that contains customer's information
    RentalHistory history; // object that contains customer's rental history
};

Answer 1

The error message indicates that the compiler doesn’t recognize RentalHistory as a type. If the type is correctly defined in the included rentalhistory.h, the most common reason for such a problem would be circular dependencies.

Does rentalhistory.h try to include customer.h? In this case you have circular includes that you need to resolve. In rentalhistory.h you would most likely have to add a forward declaration like class Customer; instead of including customer.h.

Also: Why does customer.h try to include itself?