2008 Mar 26 - Wed

C++ Custom Containers and Iterators

I'm using the HDF5 File System for holding time series information. Rather than writing my own binary search implementation to find particular elements within a particular saved time series, I thought it would be clever if I designed the interface so I could use the Standard Template Library's 'find' iterator. If I can make the STL's 'find' work, then all the other iterators should work just as well, and thus I'll have an easy mechanism to access time series with very little programming involved.

I can find any number of web sites containing information on how to work with C++'s standard containers and iterators. When it comes to finding information on custom containers and iterators, the information is not quite so plentiful.

The first article I came across was one from TechRepublic called Extending the C++ STL with custom containers. It didn't quite have the meat I was expecting.

Bjarne Stroustrup's book, The C++ Programming Language, does have a section on iterators and a section on containers. In retrospect, they are quite good introductions to the concept, but I didn't feel the examples were as informative as I would have liked.

Microsoft's MSDN has an article called C++ and STL: Take Advantage of STL Algorithms by Implementing a Custom Iterator, but this article only covers the custom iterator side of things, it doesn't discuss how it would interact with a custom container.

Dr. Dobbs inherited an article entitled Custom Containers & Iterators for STL-Friendly Code: A pair of approaches for creating custom containers from the March 2005 issue of C++ Users Journal. Some code extracts are included but there are some pieces missing, such as the begin() and end() methods and how they are put together. The link in the article to the original code no longer works. However, I did find that I have the Dr. Dobbs Developer Library DVD Release 4. On it resides the full example code. That was much more informative.

Now that I have a better understanding for what I'm looking, I see that the STL compliant container example has some useful information. In the same vein, CodeProject has another example: An STL compliant sorted vector.

Finally, I came across Ulrich Breymann's book called Desiging Components with the C++ STL. It provided all the necessary background to pull it all together. I always thought there was more to it, but custom containers and iterators may not be so hard after all. Once I have the code finished, I'll try to have it posted one way or another.

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