How can one enforce calling a base class function after derived class constructor?

Posted by Mike Elkins on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Mike Elkins
Published on 2010-04-08T14:17:53Z Indexed on 2010/04/08 14:23 UTC
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I'm looking for a clean C++ idiom for the following situation:

class SomeLibraryClass {
  public:
    SomeLibraryClass() { /* start initialization */ }
    void addFoo() { /* we are a collection of foos */ }
    void funcToCallAfterAllAddFoos() { /* Making sure this is called is the issue */ }
};
class SomeUserClass : public SomeLibraryClass {
  public:
    SomeUserClass() {
      addFoo();
      addFoo();
      addFoo(); // SomeUserClass has three foos.
    }
};
class SomeUserDerrivedClass : public SomeUserClass {
  public:
    SomeUserDerrivedClass() {
      addFoo(); // This one has four foos.
    }
};

So, what I really want is for SomeLibraryClass to enforce the calling of funcToCallAfterAllAddFoos at the end of the construction process. The user can't put it at the end of SomeUserClass::SomeUserClass(), that would mess up SomeUserDerrivedClass. If he puts it at the end of SomeUserDerrivedClass, then it never gets called for SomeUserClass.

To further clarify what I need, imagine that /* start initialization */ acquires a lock, and funcToCallAfterAllAddFoos() releases a lock.

The compiler knows when all the initializations for an object are done, but can I get at that information by some nice trick?

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