Question

I’ve got a Button class, like this:

class Button {    
    protected:
        SDL_Rect box;

    public:
        Button(string id, int x, int y, int w, int h);
        ~Button();
        virtual void handleEvent(SDL_Event event);
};

And I’ve got a special kind of Button, MyButton:

class MyButton : public Button {    
    public:
        MyButton(string id, int x, int y, int w, int h);
        ~MyButton();
        void handleEvent(SDL_Event event);          
};

The thing is, I need the MyButton::handleEvent() method to return int instead of void. What is the most elegant way to do this?

EDIT: the reason I need this is because I need to know when MyButton was pressed in order to do some other things in other classes.

Answer 1

After all with the notion of inheritance MyButton is an instance of Button. What this means is that you already have a handleEvent method defined in MyButton and we cannot have to methods with the same name and with two different return types.

This means that if you want to have a method that returns an integer you can overload your handleEvent method in MyButton with an integer reference parameter and you can set its value in the reference.

class MyButton : public Button {    
    public:
        MyButton(string id, int x, int y, int w, int h);
        ~MyButton();
        void handleEvent(SDL_Event event, int& out_param);          
};