I'm wondering how best to carry along a reference to a parent object so
I can decrement its refcount as child objects are destroyed. And I'm
wondering if I can use a typemap to help keep my XS methods simple.
I have a C structure that I return as a Perl object. Part of that
struct contains a list of pointers to other structures. I want to
provide methods on those individual list items. So, ...
In my perl code I want to do this:
my $parent_object = Foo->new; # create the Foo object.
# Return a list of Foo::List objects.
my @list = $parent_object->return_list;
for my $item ( @list ) {
print $item->name, $item->whatever;
}
Now, the problem is that the Foo::List objects are just a reference to
to the real items in the list located in the parent object. So I don't
want the parent object destroyed before ALL of the Foo::List objects are
destroyed.
So, I want to bump the ref count on $parent_object for each
item in the list. But, then I need to be able to get back to the parent
object when destroying each item.
All I can think of is to return a list of arrays where one of the
elements points back the the SV of the parent so I can do this in my
destroy method:
SvREFCNT_dec( parent );
I would think this a common problem, so I'm wondering how it's, well,
commonly solved.
My current methods are very simple and map directly to the C API of my
library. That is, I can do simple things like:
const char *
name( item )
ITEM item
And let the typemap do all the work.
Is there a way to do a typemap that will pull out my pointer from the
complex data so my individual methods can remain simple?
Thanks,
--
Bill Moseley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
