How to get the effective definitions of classes

[James Harris]

Am fairly new to C++ and trying to understand the class hierarchy of
an existing body of code that I have to work with. The way the code is
defined (many files, significantly deep class hierarchy and
conditional includes) makes it especially difficult to work out what
the classes I have to work with actually look like.

Any suggestions on how to understand the effective make-up of
individual classes and how the class hierarchy is put together?

Maybe there is a tool to do this. g++'s -fdump-class-hierarchy seems
more about vtables. All I want to see is something along the lines of

class C
member variable V
member variable V
member function F
member function F

etc. and for each member a note of its type and where it is defined.

Anyone know of a way to get this info?

James

 

[Jorgen Grahn]

Am fairly new to C++ and trying to understand the class hierarchy of
an existing body of code that I have to work with. The way the code is
defined (many files, significantly deep class hierarchy and
conditional includes)

Unless they're doing really bizarre things (like having
myclass_version_one.h and myclass_alternate_version.h),
conditional includes shouldn't affect anything here.
They do make navigation harder for humans though.

makes it especially difficult to work out what
the classes I have to work with actually look like.

Any suggestions on how to understand the effective make-up of
individual classes and how the class hierarchy is put together?

Maybe there is a tool to do this. g++'s -fdump-class-hierarchy seems
more about vtables. All I want to see is something along the lines of

class C
member variable V
member variable V
member function F
member function F

etc. and for each member a note of its type and where it is defined.

Anyone know of a way to get this info?

I tend to use Doxygen on code I'm unfamiliar with. Make it generate
HTML documentation with class diagrams as pictures.

Then when I know the code a bit better, I use pen and paper.

/Jorgen

 

[Gerhard Fiedler]

Any suggestions on how to understand the effective make-up of
individual classes and how the class hierarchy is put together?

Maybe there is a tool to do this. g++'s -fdump-class-hierarchy seems
more about vtables. All I want to see is something along the lines of

class C
member variable V
member variable V
member function F
member function F

etc. and for each member a note of its type and where it is defined.

Anyone know of a way to get this info?

Try Doxygen <http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/>. It's a
documentation tool that can extract information like this.

Gerhard

 

[James Harris]

Try Doxygen <http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/>. It's a
documentation tool that can extract information like this.

Doxygen looks very good. Thanks for both the replies.

James

 

[Jamie]

"effective"? "definition of classes"? Hitler is dead, but SS lives?