Coupling Axis2C with Qt data structures

Question

We have a SOAP-based client-server written in C++/Qt and Axis2C. It contains a lot of old-fashioned C-style structs (usually they describe raw arrays of custom data), because of the C nature of Axis2C. How can C usage be minimized in the code, which uses Axis2C? It's a pain to support these custom C structs, because it requires accuracy of assignment operators, c-tors,d-tors. Qt-based structs are less verbose.

Answer 1

I guess you are especially looking which datatypes to use instead of old fashioned C (not C++) datatypes. These datatypes are the C++ standard containers (http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/stl/) which are shipped with your compiler and are alway available. A Qt implementation of these containers is available, too (http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/containers.html).

Which one to choose depends of a lot of factors. Below I showed a simplified sample how to do this with the stl. So I think you will have to write a kind of wrapper which converts the c datatypes to C++/Qt datatypes. "std::vector" is one type of containers which is often a good replacement for c style arrays.

int32_t main ()
{
    int arraySize = 10;
    int* pCArray = new int [arraySize];

    for ( int idx = 0; idx < arraySize; ++idx )
    {
        pCArray [idx] = idx + 100;
    }

    for ( int idx = 0; idx < arraySize; ++idx )
    {
        std::cout << pCArray [idx] << std::endl;
    }

    std::cout << "-------------------------" << std::endl;

    std::vector<int> array;
    array.assign ( pCArray, pCArray + arraySize );

    delete pCArray;

    for ( int idx = 0; idx < arraySize; ++idx )
    {
        std::cout << array [idx] << std::endl;
    }

    return 0;
}

There is not need to call delete array at the end of this sample since "array" is deleted automatically (BTW delete array would not even compile).