Question

I read the documentation on visit_each, but can’t really see what exactly it does, as well as the general use for it, if every user has to overload it anyways. Someone care to enlighten me?

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Edit: Maybe I’m just so confused because the following is the whole content of <boost/visit_each.hpp> and I just don’t see any “magic” there to “visit each subobject”:

namespace boost {
  template<typename Visitor, typename T>
  inline void visit_each(Visitor& visitor, const T& t, long)
  {
    visitor(t);
  }

  template<typename Visitor, typename T>
  inline void visit_each(Visitor& visitor, const T& t)
  {
    visit_each(visitor, t, 0);
  }
}

Maybe someone can give me a concrete example of how this is supposed to look like / work?

Answer 1

I suspect the important part of that documentation is this line: “Library authors will be expected to add additional overloads that specialize the T argument for their classes, so that subobjects can be visited.” In other words, there is no general use for it, it is just a common name for any visitor-based introspection mechanism. The way it is implemented, something will happen for all types, whether their writers were aware of its existance or not, so you don’t get a compile-time failure.

It doesn’t seem overly useful to me… practically speaking, it is just an internal function of the boost signals library, but I suppose if you’re using that library anyhow specializing visit_each on your own types wouldn’t hurt.

They mention finding signals::trackable objects. So presumably, they have provided a couple specializations for their own types within the signals library. Then they have a is_trackable functor. Or something similar.

struct trackable { };

struct Introspective {
    int a;
    double b;
    trackable c;
};

struct NotIntrospective {
    int a;
    double b;
    trackable c;
};

template<typename Visitor, typename T>
inline void visit_each(Visitor& visitor, const T& t, long) {
  visitor(t);    
} 

template<typename Visitor>
inline void visit_each(Visitor& visitor, const Introspective& t, int) {
  visitor(t); //"visits" the object as a whole

  //recursively visit the member objects; if unspecialized, will simply call `visitor(x)`
  visit_each(visitor, t.a, 0);
  visit_each(visitor, t.b, 0);
  visit_each(visitor, t.c, 0);
}

struct is_trackable {
  void operator()(const trackable&) { 
    //Do something
  }

  template<typename T>
  void operator()(const T&) { }
}

int main() {
    Introspective a;
    NotIntrospective b;
    trackable c;

    visit_each(is_trackable(), a, 0); //calls specialized version, finds `a.c`
    visit_each(is_trackable(), b, 0); //calls default version, finds nothing
    visit_each(is_trackable(), c, 0); //calls default version, which "visits" the 
                                      //object itself, and finds that it is trackable
}

The key thing is that visit_each itself doesn’t do any magic, except provide a way for a call to visit_each to not fail to compile on an unrecognized type.