Hands-On Design Patterns with C++

Visiting complex objects

In the last section, we saw how the Visitor pattern allows us to add new operations to the existing hierarchy. In one of the examples, we visited a complex object that contained pointers to other objects. The visitor iterated over these pointers, in a limited way. We are now going to consider the general problem of visiting objects that are composed of other objects, or objects that contain other objects and build up to the demonstration of a working serialization/deserialization solution at the end.