INIReader: change variable visibility from private to protected

[meiyasan]

@benhoyt I am proposing to change variable visibility allowing for full feature inheritance.

[benhoyt]

Hi @xkzl I'm not opposed to this, though it's been a while since I've done C++. Are there any other implications other than making these fields accessible to subclasses? Can you please provide a small example of how this would be used?

[meiyasan]

Hi @benhoyt, sorry for my late reply. You are right, there is no other implications than making fields and methods accessible to subclasses. Unless, the variable content is very specific (void* variable manipulation that only the mother class knows about for instance), it is okay to turn this as protected.

As an example, I would mention a custom INIReader I have been designing to retain the section and fields information.
Her eis the header file:

#ifndef __INIREADER_H__
#define __INIREADER_H__

#include <map>
#include <set>
#include <string>
#include <INIReader.h>

class INIReaderPlus: public INIReader 
{
public:

    std::set<std::string> GetSections() const;
    std::set<std::string> GetFields(std::string section) const;

protected:
    int _error;
    std::map<std::string, std::string> _values;

    std::set<std::string> _sections;
    std::map<std::string, std::set<std::string>*> _fields;
    static std::string MakeKey(std::string section, std::string name);
    static int ValueHandler(void* user, const char* section, const char* name,
                            const char* value);
};

#endif

I can take advantage of your modifications and also customize the class, without protected elements I would have to rewrite the whole implementation (that I haven't studied). Doing so it helps factorizing.

[benhoyt]

@mayak-dev @jcormier @vrresto @evorw You folks are the last few people who've touched INIReader (the C++ class) -- any objections to making these internal fields protected rather than private? If not I'll go ahead and merge this later this week.

[mayak-dev]

Looks good to me!

[jjcf89]

Seems reasonable

[benhoyt]

Thanks for your replies, @mayak-dev and @jjcf89. Merging.