HowTo: Identifiers

Description

Important: Identifiers are only available to classes in the class hierarchy. Read this for more information.

The Identifier is a construct used to identify a class at runtime. It is also a container for several class-related stuff, but this is not topic of this page. Read this for more detailed information.

This page explains how to work with Identifiers.

Get the Identifier of a class

To get the Identifier belonging to a class, just use Class(ClassName):

Identifier* identifier = Class(MyClass);

It's also possible to get the Identifier of a class by using a string:

Identifier* identifier = ClassByString("MyClass");

Get the Identifier of an object

If you want to know to which class an object belongs, just use getIdentifer():

BaseObject* object = getSomeObject();

Identifer* identifier = object->getIdentifier();

Now how do you get information about this class? For example the name? Just call getName() on the Identifier:

std::cout << "The object is a " << identifier->getName() << std::endl;

The output of this code might be: "The object is a WorldEntity".

Compare classes

If you want to know if an object is an instance of a class inheriting from a given class (or it's the class itself), use isA(identifier):

BaseObject* object = getSomeObject();

bool isAMyClass = object->getIdentifier()->isA(Class(MyClass));

if (isAMyClass)
    std::cout << "Object is a MyClass!" << std::endl;

You can do this even shorter:

object->isA(Class(MyClass));

Or in combination with a classname in a string:

BaseObject* object    = getSomeObject();
std::string classname = getSomeClass();

if (object->isA(ClassByString(classname)))
    std::cout << "Object is a " << classname << "!" << std::endl;

Apart from isA(…), there are other comparision functions:

• isExactlyA
• isChildOf
• isDirectChildOf
• isParentOf
• isDirectParentOf

Read this for more information.