Type Container

SMTK’s type container (TypeContainer) is a generic container for storing single instances of types. The contained types do not have any requirements for sharing a common base class; as a result, the container does not require any parameters upon construction. Because of this, there is no run-time method for discovering the contents of a container, only for probing whether a given type is contained. As a tradeoff, element access from the container is templated on the type to be returned (the element type is used as a key to retrieve the element and subsequently perform the appropriate conversion). If an element is default-constructible, an attempt to access an element that is not currently in the container will result in the construction of an instance of that object.

An example that demonstrates the prinicples and API of this pattern can be found at smtk/comon/testing/cxx/UnitTestTypeContainer.cxx.