Large POD as tuple for sorting - c++

Question

I have a POD with about 30 members of various types and I will be wanting to store thousands of the PODs in a container, and then sort that container by one of those members.
For example:
struct Person{
int idNumber;
....many other members
}
Thousands of Person objects which I want to sort by idNumber or by any other member I choose to sort by.
I've been researching this for a while today and it seems the most efficient, or at least, simplest, solution to this is not use struct at all, and rather use tuple for which I can pass an index number to a custom comparison functor for use in std::sort. (An example on this page shows one way to implement this type of sort easily, but does so on a single member of a struct which would make templating this not so easy since you must refer to the member by name, rather than by index which the tuple provides.)
My two-part question on this approach is 1) Is it acceptable for a tuple to be fairly large, with dozens of members? and 2) Is there an equally elegant solution for continuing to use struct instead of tuple for this?

Answer 1

You can make a comparator that stores a pointer to member internaly so it knows which member to take for comparison:
struct POD {
int i;
char c;
float f;
long l;
double d;
short s;
};
template<typename C, typename T>
struct Comp {
explicit Comp(T C::* p) : ptr(p) {}
bool operator()(const POD& p1, const POD& p2) const
{
return p1.*ptr < p2.*ptr;
}
private:
T C::* ptr;
};
// helper function to make a comparator easily
template<typename C, typename T>
Comp<C,T> make_comp( T C::* p)
{
return Comp<C,T>(p);
}
int main()
{
std::vector<POD> v;
std::sort(v.begin(), v.end(), make_comp(&POD::i));
std::sort(v.begin(), v.end(), make_comp(&POD::d));
// etc...
}
To further generalize this, make make_comp take a custom comparator, so you can have greater-than and other comparisons.

Answer 2

1) Is it acceptable for a tuple to be fairly large, with dozens of members?
Yes it is acceptable. However it won't be easy to maintain since all you'll have to work with is an index within the tuple, which is very akin to a magic number. The best you could get is reintroduce a name-to-index mapping using an enum which is hardly maintainable either.
2) Is there an equally elegant solution for continuing to use struct instead of tuple for this?
You can easily write a template function to access a specific struct member (to be fair, I didn't put much effort into it, it's more a proof of concept than anything else so that you get an idea how it can be done):
template<typename T, typename R, R T::* M>
R get_member(T& o) {
return o.*M;
}
struct Foo {
int i;
bool j;
float k;
};
int main() {
Foo f = { 3, true, 3.14 };
std::cout << get_member<Foo, float, &Foo::k>(f) << std::endl;
return 0;
}
From there, it's just as easy to write a generic comparator which you can use at your leisure (I'll leave it to you as an exercise). This way you can still refer to your members by name, yet you don't need to write a separate comparator for each member.

Answer 3

You could use a template to extract the sort key:
struct A
{
std::string name;
int a, b;
};
template<class Struct, typename T, T Struct::*Member>
struct compare_member
{
bool operator()(const Struct& lh, const Struct& rh)
{
return lh.*Member < rh.*Member;
}
};
int main()
{
std::vector<A> values;
std::sort(begin(values), end(values), compare_member<A, int, &A::a>());
}
Maybe you want to have a look at boost::multi_index_container which is a very powerful container if you want to index (sort) object by different keys.

Answer 4

Create a class which can use a pointer to a Person member data to use for comparison:
std::sort(container.begin(), container.end(), Compare(&Person::idNumber));
Where Compare is:
template<typename PointerToMemberData>
struct Compare {
Compare(PointerToMemberData pointerToMemberData) :
pointerToMemberData(pointerToMemberData) {
}
template<typename Type
bool operator()(Type lhs, Type rhs) {
return lhs.*pointerToMemberData < rhs.*pointerToMemberData
}
PointerToMemberData pointerToMemberData;
};