Question

i hope there’s a simple answer to this.
without getting too complicated i have two classes. an “Animal” and a “Cell”
Cell contains an Animal as a member.
Animal has methods that accept Cells in their parameters.

i’m just confused as to how i #include each class the others header?
i’ve only ever had to go up a chain of classes and just included the last class header in the next and so on, but this circular situation has me a bit lost.

i hope that makes sense, any help greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use forward declarations to overcome the problem of circular references.

Example:

//animal.h

#include "cell.h"

class Animal {
public:
    void foo (Cell cell);
}

// cell.h

class Animal; // forward declaration

class Cell {
private:
    Animal * m_animal; // pointer to Animal object
}