Re: [Boost-users] [multi_index] MSVS 2005 visualizers?

From: Filip Konvička (filip.konvicka_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-05-29 03:24:43

> OK, here is a visualizer for multi_index_container<T, 
> indexed_by<sequenced<> > >.
>
> I have not succeeded in expanding this to other index combinations, as 
> the visualizer does not seem to support "::type" to access typedefs. 
> When I want to access the "member" member of the container, I need to 
> explicitly specify the header_holder template instantiation, which 
> seems impossible, since it takes - as the first argument - an 
> index_node type structure, which seems to be declared as 
> boost::multi_index::detail::multi_index_node_type<Value,IndexSpecifierList,Allocator>::type, 
> but this is not accessible in the visualizer (it does not like the 
> "::type" part). I'm afraid that there's no way around this, but I'll 
> try tomorrow.
Hm, I succeeded, in a way, in visualizing a indexed_by<sequenced<>, 
hashed_unique<identity<T> > > container, but with some pointer 
arithmetics and artificial classes derived from the container class in 
the compiled code. I think that I'll abandon the clean solution path for 
now, as with my current knowledge about autoexp.dat, the visualizer 
language lacks some important type accessors, nor have I found a way to 
do sub-patterns, either of which would probably enable proper 
visualization of a generic multi_index_container.

As the visualizer language does not seem to enforce cast safety as C++ 
does, I thought about using some raw pointer arithmetics to access the 
nodes / data. I succeeded with the above-mentioned case, but when I 
changed/added new indices, I was lost (I did not try that much, I admit...).

 From the "binary" point of view, is there some generic scheme that 
could be used to access the elements in the container? One can access 
node_count, but being able to display the list / array of elements would 
be nice (I don't think that it's necessary to be able to display the 
tree structure of ordered_unique, for instance), even if there are some 
additional requirements like that there is a sequenced<> index or that 
it is even the first of the indices.

I was also thinking whether it would be possible to somehow augment the 
multi_index_container class with some helper structures to help the 
visualizer, however I don't see how that could be done. Such class could 
for example contain a linked list of all nodes (like the sequenced<> 
index does, but this time this would be non-optional and accessible in a 
type-uniform way).

Thanks for any ideas :-)

Cheers,
Filip