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A single-header C++ library providing a factory for objects from classes that share a common base class, have identical single-argument constructors, can be identified by URI, and that can register their existence with the factory, so that the factory does not have to know in advance about all buildable classes.
C++ standard required: C++98 (does not use C++11)
Copyright 2007-2021 Particular Programs Ltd. Under a permissive BSD/MIT-style licence: see the file COPYING for details.
Given a base class A with many subclasses B
, C
, D
, etc, all of
which need to be passed parameters class P
in their constructor:
in a header associated with A
,
Create a template class ABuilder<T>
which inherits from
ConcreteThingBuilder<T, A, P>
. This is your class which will
be specialised to provide a builder for each subclass of A
.
Its constructor must accept a std::string
containing the URI
that identifies the class of object being built, which is
passed to the parent class's constructor. Optionally, it may
also accept and pass to the parent class a vector<string>
of
"tags", which are strings used to identify the sorts of
facility this builder's object supports -- for example, file
extensions or MIME types that the object can parse. If two
builders register support for the same tag, only the first to
register will be used (note that which one this is may depend
on static object construction ordering, so it's generally
better if tags are unique to a builder).
You may also wish to typedef ThingFactory<A, P>
to something
like AFactory
, for convenience.
in a .cpp
file associated with each of B
, C
, D
etc,
ABuilder<B>
, ABuilder<C>
,
ABuilder<D>
, etc, passing the class's identifying URI and
optional supported tag list to its constructor. (If you
like, this could be a static member of some class.)You can then do the following:
call AFactory::getInstance()->getURIs()
to retrieve a list of
all registered URIs for this factory.
call AFactory::getInstance()->create(uri, parameters)
, where
parameters is an object of type P
, to construct a new object
whose class is that associated with the URI uri.
call AFactory::getInstance()->getTags()
to retrieve a list of
all tags known to be supported by some builder. Remember that
builders do not have to support any tags and many builders
could support the same tag, so you cannot retrieve all builders
by starting from the tags list: use getURIs for that.
call AFactory::getInstance()->getURIFor(tag)
, where tag is a
std::string
corresponding to one of the tags supported by some
builder, to obtain the URI of the first builder to have
registered its support for the given tag.
call AFactory::getInstance()->createFor(tag, parameters)
, where
tag is a std::string
corresponding to one of the tags supported by
some builder and parameters is an object of type P
, to
construct a new object whose class is that built by the first
builder to have registered its support for the given tag.