[pygccxml-development] How to manage wrapper classes?

[Matthias B. <ba...@ir...>]

Hi,

let me first state the problem I'm currently trying to solve. The Maya 
SDK defines its own string class MString which is part of my bindings. 
Any function that expects a string as input actually expects a MString 
object. But for the Python version I would also like the functions to 
accept regular Python strings as well (and maybe even return Python 
strings instead of MStrings but I leave that up for later). I tried to 
use the implicitly_convertible construct but it didn't work. I could get 
it to work with a string class that also accepts a std::string in its 
constructor but the MString class only accepts const char* which didn't 
work for me.

My conclusion was that I need to write wrappers for those functions that 
expect an MString as input so that they also accept a str object. I'm 
not liking the idea of having to do that manually on each function, so I 
wonder if there's an easy way to specify that in my script and have 
pyplusplus do the real work.

I think it's easy to identify the functions that need those wrappers as 
I can just inspect the argument list of those functions. But what then?
If I could add new C++ functions to a generated source file then I think 
I could create automatic wrappers and use cdef to add those "overloaded" 
functions to the original object. But what if a function already has a 
wrapper generated by pyplusplus? How are they concatenated? Could 
pyplusplus handle that automatically?

Any ideas?

- Matthias -