I am trying to see if Rust could be used on a project that I am working on and am stuck on how to model an inheritance hierarchy in Rust. I have many objects that are currently modeled as a hierarchy and I have read chapter 17 (oo design patterns) but the ideas there would require lots of duplicated…

You could use composition, like struct Transaction { ... } struct SalesTransaction { transaction: Transaction, ... } struct Invoice { sales_transaction: SalesTransaction, ... } Then you can create some methods to convert references to the appropriate type, like so impl Invoice {…

Probably a better way to do it would be to center the whole thing around transaction IDs, like if you were doing it in a relational database. struct TransactionId(usize); struct Database { transactions: HashMap<TransactionId, TransactionData>, sales: HashMap<TransactionId, SalesData>, e…

One crate that efficiently implements @notriddle 's idea is specs , although that may be a bit more heavy weight than you need.

But that would mean any client of Invoice will have to do the following to access any fields in SalesTransaction or Transaction: invoice.sales_transaction.customer In addition to being inconvenient, it also makes moving fields difficult. Imagine dueDate was to be moved from Invoice to SalesTransac…

Another idea you can use to translate inheritance is composition, but inverted with the composed bit being a generic struct: trait TransactionKind { /* whatever you need to be able to treat different kinds of transactions generically */ } struct Transaction<K: TransactionKind> { /* stuff f…

I'm surprised I haven't seen this suggested so far, but I encourage you to try modeling this with enums. It's likely to be less code and easier to write. I use this pattern whenever I run into something that feels like inheritance, and it's worked great for me. (I am making some assumptions here, w…

How to model inheritance hierarchy?

help

TomP October 8, 2019, 1:46am 7

The second of the Rust koans addresses this topic.

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How to model inheritance hierarchy?

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