- The Takeaway
- Document Management
- The Base Class: AnyOldDocument
- Economy in Coding
- The First Document Type: A Memo
- The Second Document Typean Invoice
- The Third and Last Document Typea Contract
- Leveraging Base Class Generality
- Polymorphism
- Complete Program Output
- Make Your Destructors Virtual
- Conclusion
- Additional Reading
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
The First Document Type: A Memo
Listing 3 illustrates a memo document. The advent of email kind of killed off the memo, which is usually a message concerning some matter of importance such as an office party or a vacation J. The memo class is derived from AnyOldDocument and just inherits the member functions and data members of this base class.
Listing 3 Our Most Basic Document—the Memo
class MemoDocument : AnyOldDocument {
public:
explicit MemoDocument(int Id, char* name, int docType);
virtual ~MemoDocument();
};
MemoDocument::MemoDocument(int Id, char* name, int docType)
: AnyOldDocument(Id, name, docType)
{
printf ("Creating a Memo document for: %s\n", name);
}
MemoDocument::~MemoDocument() { }
Looking at Listing 3, you can see that the constructor for MemoDocument uses the constructor from the base class. If you run the code supplied with this article you can see that the program output is as shown in Listing 4.
Listing 4 Program Output
Invoking 3-parameter constructor for AnyOldDocument Creating a Memo document for: Calling All Employees
Listing 4 shows that the base class constructor is automatically called once an instance of MemoDocument is created. This is pretty powerful! It means that most of the complexity attached to creating document instances can reside in the base class (including error handling, special cases, and so on). This helps to simplify the application code that actually uses the documents.
Let’s now create an expanded document type by using the third constructor in AnyOldDocument. To begin with, let’s create an invoice document.