Requesting suggestions for how to fake polymorphic values in Ice-E

[bartley]

I'm trying to implement something similar to the ShapeProcessor example presented in the manual (pps 123-124), but I want to do it in Ice-E.

The problem I've run into is Ice-E's lack of support for 1) pass-by-value for classes; and 2) sequences of objects. I'd really like to be able to do both of these in Ice-E.

So, does anyone have a suggestion for a good way to fake it? That is, if your ShapeProcessor was running on an embedded device, what would be the best way to modify the Slice (below) for Ice-E?

class Shape
   {
   // Definitions for shapes, such as size, center, etc.
   };

class Circle extends Shape
   {
   // Definitions for circles, such as radius...
   };
   
class Rectangle extends Shape
   {
   // Definitions for rectangles, such as width and length...
   };

sequence<Shape> ShapeSeq;

interface ShapeProcessor
   {
   void processShapes(ShapeSeq ss);
   };

If I relaxed my requirements so that I could live without sequences of objects, would that help make faking things easier? The Slice could be:

class Shape
   {
   // Definitions for shapes, such as size, center, etc.
   };

class Circle extends Shape
   {
   // Definitions for circles, such as radius...
   };
   
class Rectangle extends Shape
   {
   // Definitions for rectangles, such as width and length...
   };

interface ShapeProcessor
   {
   void processShape(Shape s);
   };

Any ideas? Many thanks!

best,

chris

[bernard]

Hi Chris,

There is no simple work-around. Maybe you could use structs and sequences of structs, e.g.

struct Shape
{
 // data members common to all shapes
};

struct Circle
{
   Shape shape;
   //  Circle-specific data members
};

struct Rectangle
{
   Shape shape;
   // Rectangle-specific data members
};

and then in your C++ or Java code, create wrappers that provide the desired polymorphic API.

processShapes is the most difficult. This could work for some applications:

void processShapes(ShapeSeq ss, CircleSeq cs, RectangleSeq rs);

Cheers,
Bernard