Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!hc!lll-winken!uunet!cimshop!davidm
From: davidm@cimshop.UUCP (David Masterson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Objectifying incoming messages?
Summary: General to specific object types
Message-ID: <444@cimshop.UUCP>
Date: 26 Jul 89 17:17:08 GMT
Organization: Consilium Mt. View CA
Lines: 21

I'm working in an area doing C++ development that has several processes
communicating with one another.  The messages shipped back and forth tend to
be asynchronous, so a receiving process cannot know what the message is or who
it came from until it looks at the message data.  My question is this:

What is the appropriate method of taking a generic object (Message) and
turning it into an object of the type that is embedded in the message (say,
Employee)?  Should this be done through virtual functions and subclassing of
the Message object?  Or is it more appropriate to have the Message object look
at itself and construct an object of the appropriate type (perhaps some sort
of array of pointers to object constructors)?

The fundamental question hinges around the lack of context of the incoming
message.  Therefore, the message user must look at the data in order to
determine what to coerce (definition?) the message into.  Is this appropriate
or is there a better way?

aTdHvAaNnKcSe

David Masterson
uunet!cimshop!davidm		or		DMasterson@cup.portal.com