Hi Franclin,
Downcasting from a derived class to a parent class is possible with the
dynamic_cast operator. From what you have written in your mail, it looks like
the snippet won't compile at all, I can bet something it will as I tried it a
couple of hours ago. Try it yourself and let me know.
The code is correct and will compile, it's just that the casts won't work as you
expect.
Okay, let's see:
osg::Geode myGeode = new osg::Geode;
myGeode->addDrawable(new osg::ShapeDrawable(new osg::Box(osg::Vec3(),1,1,1)));
osg::Drawable* myDrawable = myGeode->getDrawable(0);
myDrawable is a Drawable* to a ShapeDrawable
This is fine since Drawable is a base class of ShapeDrawable.
(I assume there aren't any other Drawables in myGeode and the first one is
actually the ShapeDrawable you added.)
osg::Geometry* myGeom = myDrawable->asGeometry();
If you take a look at 'osg::Drawable' you'll see that this actually *always*
returns 0 and ShapeDrawable doesn't override it (Geometry is the only class that
overrides it).
However, even doing what the comment says (and what you're doing for 'myGeom2'):
osg::Geometry* geom = dynamic_cast<osg::Geometry*>(this)
This cannot succeed since the *object* is-a ShapeDrawable (even though the
pointer is Drawable*).
Of course, downcasting from shapedrawable to geometry would have not worked
and even worse would have not compiled at all.
Agreed. But introducing a Drawable* doesn't help because it doesn't change the
type of the object the pointer is pointing to.
ShapeDrawable* shape = new ShapeDrawable(...)
Drawable* drawable = dynamic_cast<Drawable*>(shape); // OK, is a base class
Geometry* geom = dynamic_cast<Geometry*>(drawable); // is always 0
I'm probably not explaining this as clearly as possible but try to think of it
this way: you have a base class 'Vehicle' and two derived classes 'Car' and
'Plane'. You can create a 'Plane' and have a 'Vehicle' pointer to it but you
can't cast that pointer to a 'Car'.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
/ulrich
_______________________________________________
osg-users mailing list
osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org
http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
