I am using the Qt QGraphicsScene class, adding pre-defined items such as QGraphicsRectItem, QGraphicsLineItem, etc. and I want to serialize the scene contents to disk. However, the base QGraphicsItem class (that the other items I use derive from) doesn't support serialization so I need to roll my own code. The problem is that all access to these objects is via a base QGraphicsItem pointer, so the serialization code I have is horrible:

QGraphicsScene* scene = new QGraphicsScene;
scene->addRect(QRectF(0, 0, 100, 100));
scene->addLine(QLineF(0, 0, 100, 100));
...
QList<QGraphicsItem*> list = scene->items();
foreach (QGraphicsItem* item, items)
{
  if (item->type() == QGraphicsRectItem::Type)
  {
    QGraphicsRectItem* rect = qgraphicsitem_cast<QGraphicsRectItem*>(item);
    // Access QGraphicsRectItem members here
  }
  else if (item->type() == QGraphicsLineItem::Type)
  {
    QGraphicsLineItem* line = qgraphicsitem_cast<QGraphicsLineItem*>(item);
    // Access QGraphicsLineItem members here
  }
  ...
}

This is not good code IMHO. So, instead I could create an ABC class like this:

class Item
{
public:
  virtual void serialize(QDataStream& strm, int version) = 0;
};

class Rect : public QGraphicsRectItem, public Item
{
public:
  void serialize(QDataStream& strm, int version)
  {
    // Serialize this object
  }
  ...
};

I can then add Rect objects using QGraphicsScene::addItem(new Rect(,,,));

But this doesn't really help me as the following will crash:

QList<QGraphicsItem*> list = scene->items();
foreach (QGraphicsItem* item, items)
{
  Item* myitem = reinterpret_class<Item*>(item);
  myitem->serialize(...) // FAIL
}

Any way I can make this work?