A second Delphi tech tip... unveiling why I suggested the first one. But before I get to that, thanks for the comments, the corrections, and all the feedback to the first tip. I didn't want to reply in comments, because the reply was worth a second post. In fact, this new post will describe the original reason I wrote the TCast.GetAs function presented in that tip. Some of you were right in suggesting many other general alternatives, but most of them wouldn't have worked in the specific scenario.

A Classic Problem: Overloading on Derived Types

The problem I was facing is a very classic problem of OOP. Suppose you have a base class, with a method returning on object of that class. Now suppose you have an inherited class, and you'd like the same method (or an overloaded version of the same virtual method) to have the same parameters, but return the derived class type. In coding terms, if TDerived inherits from TBase, I'd want to have the methods:

function TBase.Get (name: string): TBase;
function TDerived.Get (name: string): TDerived;

The reason is I want to be able to assigned the value returned by TDerived.Get to a reference of the TDerived class without an explicit cast. 

Returning a TRlxActiveRecord

To be even more specific, the method in question comes from the Delphi Relax framework, and specifically from the TRlxActiveRecord class. There is a Get method taking a "id" paraemter and retuning a new object, after executing a database query and copying data from the dataset to the object's fields. Adding a generic GetAs function, I'm able to ask for an object of the given type, converted to the type. You can see the actual code at line 349 of the RlxActiveRecord unit... following this link: http://code.marcocantu.com/p/delphirelax/source/tree/59/source/RlxActiveRecord.pas#L349.

As someone suggested, raising an exception could be a better idea. Again, I know there are other alternatives, but I think that in a simialr context the code makes more sense than in the more generic case I tried to present in the first tip. The fact is that rather than writing:

      emp := TEmployee.Get(4) as TEmployee;
    

I can write:

emp := TEmployee.Get(4);
    

Not a huge difference, I know, but I think it is more readable. In any case, this should make my reasons more clear.

But is it "The Solution"?

Of course, this is not "The Solution" of the problem. It is not what I was asking for (overloading virtual methods by return value), but it is the closest solution I can think of using Delphi as a language. Most strongly-type and static / compiled languages will share the same issue, but not all of them.

If you have better ideas (I know you have many ideas!), let me know. The blog is open for debate, and "tips with debate" is much better than "tips sitting along on the web".