Factory Pattern in C++ -- doing this correctly?

Question

I am relatively new to "design patterns" as they are referred to in a formal sense. I've not been a professional for very long, so I'm pretty new to this.

We've got a pure virtual interface base class. This interface class is obviously to provide the definition of what functionality its derived children are supposed to do. The current use and situation in the software dictates what type of derived child we want to use, so I recommended creating a wrapper that will communicate which type of derived child we want and return a Base pointer that points to a new derived object. This wrapper, to my understanding, is a factory.

Well, a colleague of mine created a static function in the Base class to act as the factory. This causes me trouble for two reasons. First, it seems to break the interface nature of the Base class. It feels wrong to me that the interface would itself need to have knowledge of the children derived from it.

Secondly, it causes more problems when I try to re-use the Base class across two different Qt projects. One project is where I am implementing the first (and probably only real implementation for this one class... though i want to use the same method for two other features that will have several different derived classes) derived class and the second is the actual application where my code will eventually be used. My colleague has created a derived class to act as a tester for the real application while I code my part. This means that I've got to add his headers and cpp files to my project, and that just seems wrong since I'm not even using his code for the project while I implement my part (but he will use mine when it is finished).

Am I correct in thinking that the factory really needs to be a wrapper around the Base class rather than the Base acting as the factory?

Answer 1

You do NOT want to use your interface class as the factory class. For one, if it is a true interface class, there is no implementation. Second, if the interface class does have some implementation defined (in addition to the pure virtual functions), making a static factory method now forces the base class to be recompiled every time you add a child class implementation.

The best way to implement the factory pattern is to have your interface class separate from your factory.

A very simple (and incomplete) example is below:

class MyInterface
{
public:
    virtual void MyFunc() = 0;
};

class MyImplementation : public MyInterface
{
public:
    virtual void MyFunc() {}
};

class MyFactory
{
public:
    static MyInterface* CreateImplementation(...);
};