Resolved: Defining a nested class out of line in C++

In this post, we will see how to resolve Defining a nested class out of line in C++

Question:

Sorry if this has been asked before; I found similarly titled questions, but none of them focused on the same aspects I’m having trouble with.
There’s a class A, and a class B that should only be accessible from A. I think nesting B inside A will achieve that, but I’m struggling with the logistics.
A has a B as a member. As such, not defining B prior to declaring A’s members causes incomplete type errors. I thought I’d get around this by declaring A, defining A::B, then defining A, but that just throws the same errors plus incomplete type 'A' in nested name specifier.

class A;

class A::B
{
    ...
};

class A
{
private:
    class B;
    B b;
    ...
};

The only functional examples I can find would put B’s member declaration directly inside A’s, which I’d really like to avoid doing: B’s header information is several times longer and much denser than A’s. Splitting the two up into separate files would be best, but actually nesting them inline is incredibly unwieldy.
Fallback options at this point include making A’s B a pointer (no real reason why not, but is this really something that can’t be done?) and leaving them as independent classes. But surely this can’t be that hard?
What do I need to declare to link these properly and in what order?
I am not particularly knowledgeable about the depths of C++ so please explain like I’m five and refrain from shaming me into the ground for not knowing everything.

Best Answer:

Since b is a non-reference non static data member of class A, it must be declared to have a complete type.
One way to solve this would be to either make b a reference type(as shown below) or a pointer to a B:

class A
{
private:
    class B;
//--vv------------>now b is an lvalue reference to a B object
    B& b;   
};


class A::B
{
    
};

Method 2

Other option is to define B inside A with only its member declaration and then define those members outside as shown below:

class A
{
private:
    //defined class now 
    class B
    {
         void member1();
    };

    B b;      //works now 
};

void A::B::member1()
{

}

If you have better answer, please add a comment about this, thank you!

Source: Stackoverflow.com

Question:

Best Answer:

Method 2

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