I notice that Swig provides a whole host of functions to allow for typecasting objects to their parent classes. However, in C++ one can produce a function like the following:

A * getAnObject()
{
  if(someBoolean)
    return (A *) new B;
  else
    return (A *) new C;
}

Where "A" is the parent of classes "B" and "C". One can then typecast the pointer returned into being a "B" type or "C" type at one's convenience like:

B * some_var = (B *) getAnObject();

Is there some way I can typecast an object I've received from a generic-pointer-producing function at run-time in the scripting language using the wrappers? (In my case, Lua?) I have a function that could produce one of about a hundred possible classes, and I'd like to avoid writing an enormous switch structure that I'd have to maintain in C++. At the point where I receive the generic pointer, I also have a string representation of the data type I'd like to cast it to.

Any thoughts? Thanks!

-- EDIT --

I notice that SWIG offers to generate copy constructors for all of my classes. If I had it generate those, could I do something like the following?:

var = myModule.getAnObject(); -- Function that returns an object type-cast down to a pointer of the parent class, as in the function getAnObject() above.
var = myModule.ClassThatExtendsBaseClass(var); -- A copy constructor that SWIG theoretically creates for me

and have var then be an instance of the inheriting class that knows it's an instance of the inheriting class?