Skip to main content

C++ property and detection of property change event

In C++, property means a private field with a getter and a setter method. Unlike C# and other languages, it is part of the language where it is set or accessed just like a field. In C++ never had the notion of the way C# address gets or set of property field(s).

However, in MSVC, Clang a property extension has been added to give a notion of get / set of property. How it looks like? Let's have a small code: 

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using std::cout;
using std::string;

class Animal
{
    string sName_;

public:
    string getName() const { return sName_; }
    void setName(const string &asName)
    {
        sName_ = asName;
    }

public:
    __declspec(property(get = getName, put = setName)) string sName;
};

int main()
{
    Animal aObj;
    // Set animal name
    aObj.sName = "Cat";
    cout << "The animal is: " << aObj.sName << "\n";
}

The __declspec extension uses the get and set methods, and these two methods have to be public.

One can argue the usage of properties can also be done through getter and setter methods. Then why to use __declspec properties. This can help us to detect an event on property change. This is nicely shown by  Dmitri Nesteruk in his youtube video. However, the following code snippet is showing same along with some modifications (Compiles in MSVC 2022): 

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

#include <boost/signals2/signal.hpp>

using std::cout;
using std::string;
using boost::signals2::signal;

template<typename T>
class INotifyPropertyChange
{
public:
    signal<void(T*, string, string)> PropertyChanged;
};

class Animal : public INotifyPropertyChange<Animal>
{
    string sName_;

public:
    string getName() const { return sName_; }
    void setName(const string &asName) 
    {
        if (asName == sName_) return;
        if (sName_.empty())
        {
            sName_ = asName;
            return;
        }
        string localName = sName_;
        sName_ = asName;
        PropertyChanged(this, localName, asName);
    }

public:
    __declspec(property(get = getName, put = setName)) string sName;
};

int main()
{
    Animal aObj;
    boost::signals2::connection aConnObj = aObj.PropertyChanged.connect([](Animal* pAnimal, string aOldName, string aNewName)
        {
            cout << "Animal name has changed from: " << aOldName << " to " << aNewName << "!\n";
        });
    aObj.sName = "Cat";
    aObj.sName = "Dog";
    aObj.sName = "Horse";
    aConnObj.disconnect(); // Once disconnected no more notification 
                                           //  gets generated for property change

    aObj.sName = "Squirrel";
}

Output: 



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reversing char array without splitting the array to tokens

 I was reading about strdup, a C++ function and suddenly an idea came to my mind if this can be leveraged to aid in reversing a character array without splitting the array into words and reconstructing it again by placing spaces and removing trailing spaces. Again, I wanted an array to be passed as a function argument and an array size to be passed implicitly with the array to the function. Assumed, a well-formed char array has been passed into the function. No malformed array checking is done inside the function. So, the function signature and definition are like below: Below is the call from the client code to reverse the array without splitting tokens and reconstructing it. Finally, copy the reversed array to the destination.  For GNU C++, we should use strdup instead _strdup . On run, we get the following output: Demo code

XOR (Exclusive OR) for branchless coding

The following example shows the array reversing using the  XOR operator . No need to take any additional variable to reverse the array.   int main(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]) { char str[] = "I AM STUDENT"; int length = strlen(str); for(int i = 0; i < ((length/2)); i++) { str[i] ^= str[length - (1+i)]; str[length - (1+i)] ^= str[i]; str[i] ^= str[length - (1+i)]; } cout << str << endl; return 0; } The above example is one of the uses of XOR but XOR comes in handy when we can do branchless coding  methods like butterfly switch etc. Sometimes this is very effective in speeding up the execution.  Let's see one of the uses of XOR in branchless coding. I am taking a simple example of Y = | X |.  Yes, I am generating abs of a supplied number. So, my function signature/definition in C++ looks like below: int absoluteBranch( int x) {     if (x < 0 ) {         return -x;     }     else {         retur

Power of Two

  I n this post will be discussing how to calculate if a number is a power of two or not. As an example, 8 is a power of two but the number 10 is not. There are many ways we can solve this. First , we will take an approach which is simple and iterative. In this case, we will calculate the power of two one by one and check with the supplied number. The below code illustrates it. bool isPowerofTwo(unsigned num) { auto y = 1; while (0 != y) { if (num == y) return true; if (num < y) return false; y <<= 1; } return false; } Second , assuming, the number is a 32-bit number, this is also an iterative solution. In this scenario, iterating all bits and counting the set bits. Any number which is a power of 2 will have only one bit set and the rest will be zeros. As an example, 8 in binary representation is 1000. Using this observation, we can implement an iterative solution. bool isPowerofTwo(unsigned num) { auto one_count = 0; for (auto index = 0; index < 32;