Type Reflection

C++ does not allow to enumerate the members and methods of a class and get their names. This functionality has to be provided by the programmer and is typically refered to as type reflection. Information about members and methods allows meta programming which is interesting for example to provide automatic functionality to generate GUIs or imlpement serializations for reflected types.

In the cgv framework type reflection is kept as simple as possible for the user that provides type reflection information as well as for the developer that implements functionality using type information. The basic idea builds on the visitor concept. Functions that provide type reflection information take as their single argument a reference to the visitor class which is derived from the reflection_handler class. In the function all base classes, members and methods are described to the visitor.

To be continued ...