I am using boost::iostreams to abstract away a couple of different methods of talking to our hardware devices.  So I've created a device for each transport, each of which derive from device<bidirectional>; ip_device, serial_device, and usb_device.  I then declare streams for each as stream<ip_device>, etc...

Now that I have the streams, I have a class that communicates with the device and I would like to construct or initialize an object of that class with any one of the streams.  I have yet to figure out how to form the constructor/function parameter to allow this.

I've tried something like this, a stream of the base type of my devices:

void init( stream< device<bidirectional> > str);

I think something like this may work but I'm not sure if I want to template the function:

template< typename T>

void init(stream<T> str);

A reference to any kind of discussion about using templates in such a way would help me in more than just this instance.

Thanks for any input,

Josh