Is it bad practice for a child object to have a pointer to its parent?

Question

In a C++ application, let\'s say I have a window class, which has several instances of a control class. If my window wanted to notify a control that it had been clicked, I m

Answer 1

You can consider a hierarchy of controls as being a tree-like graph data structure; when you visualize it that way, it's quite reasonable for a control to have a pointer to its parent.

As for whether objects or pointers to objects should be stored in a vector, well, it depends. You should usually prefer to store objects, but there are a lot of times that you can't do so or it's impractical to do so. For example, if you need to take advantage of polymorphism and store different types of things all derived from a common base class, you'll need to use pointers.

If you do store pointers, make sure to either use a smart pointer of some kind or a pointer container; otherwise, exception safety is a beating.