Unexpected results when dereferencing ScopedPointer

#1

Howdy,

My class PCCBeta has a member ScopedPointer<PCCBeta::User> user .

According to the debugger, user looks like this:

13%20pm

As you can see, isAnonymous == true . However the following expressions all evaluate to false:

bool a = user->isAnonymous;
bool b = (*user).isAnonymous;
bool c = user->isAnonymous == true;
bool d = (*user).isAnonymous == true;

As the debugger shows:

24%20pm

All the debugger output above is from the same breakpoint.

I’ve tried to replicate this but to no avail. PCCBeta::User is a nested class and the above code is being called within a function of the class PCCBeta. Wondering if the class nesting (which I haven’t played with much before) may be an interference. Also: isAnonymous is a public member of PCCBeta::User.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts you may have!

Cheers :slight_smile:

#2

Do you initialize it properly to a value? If you don’t initialize the value, the compiler is free to generate code that behaves nonsensically at run time.

#3

Thanks Xenakios,

Yes, I have initialized it properly (I believe!). Here are the constructors for PCCBeta::User :

PCCBeta::User::User() {
    isAnonymous = true;
    email = "";
    name = "";
}

PCCBeta::User::User(String email, String name) {
    isAnonymous = false;
    this->email = email;
    this->name = name;
}

Here is the actual initialization:

XmlElement* userXML = pf.getXmlValue("user");
PCCBeta::User userObj = PCCBeta::User::fromXML(*userXML);
ScopedPointer<PCCBeta::User> userPtr = &userObj;
user = userPtr;

And here is PCCBeta::User::fromXML() :

PCCBeta::User PCCBeta::User::fromXML(XmlElement xml) {
    
    bool isAnonymous = xml.getBoolAttribute("isAnonymous", true);
    String email = xml.getStringAttribute("email", "");
    String name = xml.getStringAttribute("name", "");
    
    PCCBeta::User user = PCCBeta::User(email, name);
    user.isAnonymous = isAnonymous;
    return user;
    
}

I do know that this code is messy, the constructors should really just be one constructor, etc. But can’t see what would be wrong with initialisation?

Thanks!

#4

This looks very very unhealthy, why are you doing it like this?

ScopedPointer<PCCBeta::User> userPtr = &userObj;
#5

Agreed it’s badly written. That was a workaround for an error which I didn’t understand. So yes lots of ugly patching. Is there reason to think that would mess things up this way?

#6

ScopedPointer is for managing heap allocated ("new"ed) objects. If I read the code correctly you are initializing the ScopedPointer from the address of a local variable, which doesn’t make any sense.

#7

That’s a good lead, thank you -> didn’t realise there could be a distinction that way. I’ll try removing any code that ties a ScopedPointer to stack allocated objects. Cheers :slight_smile: