a function instead of copy-and-paste programming

Question

I have an object, every member variable in this object has a name which I can acquire it by calling get_name() ,what I want to do is concatenate all the names of the member variables in alphabetical order, then do something. for example:

class CXMLWrapper<class T>
{
public:
    CXMLWrapper(const char* p_name) : m_local_name(p_name)
    {
    }
    //skip the get_name(), set_name() and others    
private:
    string m_local_name;
    T m_type_var;
}
class object
{
public:
    object() : m_team("team"), m_base("base")
    {
    }
public:
    CXMLWrapper<string> m_team;
    CXMLWrapper<string> m_base;
...
}

I have to hard-code like this:

object o;
string sign = o.m_base.get_name();
sign += o.m_team.get_name();

I need a function to do this instead of copying and pasting when the object varies. Anyone has an idea?

Answer 1

One way to do this in normal C++, provided all of the members belong to the same class or are derived from some base class will be to use variable number of arguments to a function. An example follows.

#include <stdarg.h>
string concatenateNames(int numMembers, ...)
{
    string output;
    va_list args;
    va_start(args, numMembers);
    for(int i = 0; i < numMembers; i++)
    {
        MemberClass *pMember = va_arg(args, MemberClass*);
        output += pMember->get_name();
    }
    va_end(args);
    return output;
}

class Object
{
    public:
        MemberClass x;
        MemberClass y;
        MemberClass z;
};

int main()
{
    Object o;
    string sign = concatenateNames(3, &o.x, &o.y, &o.z);
}

If the types of all the members are different, you can look into variadic templates of C++11x: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variadic_Templates, but I can't seem to find a way to do otherwise.