friendship and pImpl idiom

[jimmy]

Hi,

I had a class Foo that grants friendship to a class FooFriend. I then
wanted to use the pImpl idiom to FooFriend. So I have something like
this,

class FooFriend
{
private:
class FooFriendImpl;
FooFriendImpl *pImpl;
}

class FooFriend;
class FooFriend::FooFriendImpl;
class Foo
{
friend class FooFriend;
friend class FooFriend::FooFriendImpl; // error here
}

I would like to keep class FooFriend::FooFriendImpl but not sure if
this is possible. Any suggestions? I would think many people have come
accross this problem.

-Jimmy

 

[Alf P. Steinbach]

* jimmy:

Hi,

I had a class Foo that grants friendship to a class FooFriend. I then
wanted to use the pImpl idiom to FooFriend. So I have something like
this,

class FooFriend
{
private:
class FooFriendImpl;
FooFriendImpl *pImpl;
}

Missing semicolon. Hence: is this the actual code? Very little can be
said about errors in the actual code based on hypothetical example.

class FooFriend;
class FooFriend::FooFriendImpl;
class Foo
{
friend class FooFriend;
friend class FooFriend::FooFriendImpl; // error here

You're accessing a private (inaccessible) feature of FooFriend.

}

Missing semicolon.

I would like to keep class FooFriend::FooFriendImpl but not sure if
this is possible. Any suggestions? I would think many people have come
accross this problem.

class Foo;

class X
{
friend class Foo;
private:
class Y;
};

class Foo
{
friend class X;
friend class X::Y;
};

 

[jimmy]

But then Foo has access to X's private stuff. That's worse. I'll just
stick to what I have. -b

 

[Alf P. Steinbach]

* jimmy:

But then Foo has access to X's private stuff. That's worse. I'll just
stick to what I have. -b

Please quote what you're replying to.

That said, just make the declaration of Y public instead of private; I
presumed there was some reason you wanted it private, and that implied
friendship granted to Foo.

The whole point of PIMPL is that nobody has access to the innards of Y,
except the implementation file, regardless of whether the class name is
accessible elsewhere.