You can use the typeid keyword, get the hash of the type, and store multiple types (pointers to them?) in a map (c++11 unordered_map might be fastest out of standard containers).

So when you add a type you allocate the object of that type, and put the pointer in the map with the key as the hash of the type (from the thing returned by typeid)

Same with access.

But that adds a run time cost (if you use a hash map as the container it should be nearly O(1) though), even though you should know what types you will have at compile time.

So you need to pick between convenience and a unnecessary run time cost.

See this: ResourcePool.h.

What I did was to create a base, pure interface, resource container class (Abstract Base Class) then derive a templated class from it which the application can use.

Basically it would look like this:

// ResourcePool to be created by the res pool will inherit from this class
class IResourceItem
{
	...
};

class ResourcePool
{
public:

	virtual ~ResourcePool( void ) { }

	virtual IResourceItem * Create( void ) = 0;

	virtual Delete( IResourceItem *pItem ) = 0;

	...
};


template < typename T >
class ResourcePoolT : public ResourcePool
{
public:

	ResourcePoolT( void ) { }

	virtual ~ResourcePoolT( void ) { }

	virtual IResourceItem * Create( void ) { /* create resource */ }

	virtual Delete( IResourceItem *pItem ) { /* Delete resource */ }

	// Ulitily functions to do away with type casting every time we create the resource
	T * CreateResource( void ) { return (T*)Create(); }

	...
};


// Your resources manager class
class ResourcePoolManager
{
	vector<ResourcePool> m_resources;  // Or you could use a map to associate each resource to a certain type(enum, key, id...)
};

So your manager doesn't have to keep track different kind of resource container types. It just manages the base, pure-virtual, ResourcePool class.

I hope this helps :)

If you want it to support multiple Container objects of the same type, you can always make the map point to potentially multiple objects when you access it with the hash of the type (unordered_multimap?)

Now, i was assuming that you wanted to be able to get your container for objects of type T from the resources class, assuming it was added in elsewhere. But i dont see how that would work with multiple containers of the same type, unless you give the containers ID's (so you would have a sprite container 1 and sprite container 2 for example)

Anyways, if you only need a single container per type in the resources class, the access would look like:

res->container<Sprite>()["blah"]["blah"]("blah")

where container method looks like:

template<T>

Container<T> container()

{

return static_cast<T*>(m_containerMap.find(typeid(T).hash_code())); //Might want to check if the container actually exists for that type first

}

hash_code() seems to be a C++11 feature though, according to the internets. If you dont have C++11 you can get the name of the type and use that instead.