Adam, Thank you for your quick reply. I had looked at the particular page that you reference, but was confused by its contents. I was confused by the reference documentation included with multi_index for a few reasons. My main points of confusion came from: - Reference pages have no introductory text - http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_36_0/libs/multi_index/doc/reference/hash_indices.htmldoesn't say what a hash index is, what it is used for, etc. The main reference page is especially terse http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_36_0/libs/multi_index/doc/reference/index.ht.... - Header file "synopsis" - it is probably lost on me, but why are excerpts of the source code included? - Large amount of source code inclusion - as a user of the library I haven't found the inclusion of portions of the headers particularly helpful. I am sure that there is a good reason for them to be there, but why not just have a simple line or two stating that a particular header is required for certain situations? - Font usage - why are "Effects" "Returns" "Complexity" in the same size (or very similar size) font as "Modifiers"? It took my eye away from the actual method names, which is what I was looking for. - Why are the constructors, method names, etc so far down the page (six page downs on my computer)? It seems like that is the information that is most helpful/searched for. Now that I understand what I am looking at a little bit better, it does look like multi_index does follow the same outline as some other boost libraries (like bimap). That said, multi_index still looks like it has a way to go to catch up with some other libraries (Asio and Tuple, for instance), which I find much easier to use and understand. I can see from the boost-users archive that documentation standardization has been an issue for a while (goes back to at least 2005). I also realize that this is free software and the documentation is what it is. As a user that is used to documentation from other vendors and other styles (JavaDoc, DoxyGen, MSDN library), this documentation is severely lacking. That is a shame because I think that multi_index itself looks like a great library that should be used by as many developers as possible. Thanks, Nick On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 3:50 PM, Adam Merz <adammerz@hotmail.com> wrote:
Nick Martin writes:
There doesn't appear to be comprehensive class reference documentation. I only figured out how to do simple tasks like inserting new items into the container by looking at the examples (http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_36_0/libs/multi_index/example/basic.cpp
).
My specific question (which the examples don't seem to cover) is how to
tell
when insertion fails. What if the new item's unique key constraint fails? I have had many other, seemingly simple questions that I would hope could be answered in minutes or seconds that have turned into hours of trial and error and combing through example programs. What other resources are out there that I refer to in order to use this great library?
Full reference documentation is here:
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_36_0/libs/multi_index/doc/reference/index.ht...
Insert behavior is documented here:
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_36_0/libs/multi_index/doc/reference/ord_indi...
In answer to your specific question, "The return value is a pair p. p.second is true if and only if insertion took place. On successful insertion, p.first points to the element inserted; otherwise, p.first points to an element that caused the insertion to be banned. Note that more than one element can be causing insertion not to be allowed."
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