[Marble-devel] Review Request: provide nodeType information for downcasting

[Jens-Michael Hoffmann]

Am Sunday 26 July 2009 12:04:46 schrieb Andrew Manson:
> 
> On Saturday 25 July 2009 13:20:51 jensmh at gmx.de wrote:
> > 1) casting in C++ is like goto in C, we should not use it.
> 
> You see this is the problem with the current GeoData approach! We need to have 
> some way to cast back to what is inserted into a GeoDataDocument or a 
> GeoDataContainer because this information is currently lost because it is pass 
> by reference and ultimately everything is statically downcast to a 
> GeoDataFeature and we loose our typing information. 
> 
> > 2) if we want to cast in a safe way, we should use the compilers RTTI, or  
> >maybe Qt's, but not build our own RTTI
> 
> If we were to use the compilers RTTI then we would have to redo the whole 
> design of GeoData, which I can safely say that at this stage nobody wants to 
> do!  But on the other side if we wanted to use Qt's RTTI then we would have to 
> make every GeoData a QObject, which is more than likely a bit of overkill no?

sure, I agree.

I'm not against applying this patch, but I think we should know that we are doing
something which is conceptually wrong (imho) and we should know why we do it.