return a Type, or how to preserve a type of an object pointer?

Question

I have a very complicated code structure, but the important bits are:

typical setup: I have a base class and two classes that derive from this base class and each ha

Answer 1

Use dynamic_cast to try to cast a pointer-to-base-class to pointer-to-derived-class. It will return NULL if the pointed-to object of the base class does not exist (NULL value of the base pointer), or is not actually a derived class object. If the result, instead, is not NULL, you have a valid pointer-to-derived-class.

int main(){
    IOService ioService;
    BaseSolver* mySolver = ioService.getSolver();
    SolverB* bSolver = dynamic_cast(mySolver);
    if (bSolver != NULL)
    {
        int finallyIGotB = bSolver->b;
        cout << finallyIGotB;
    }
}

Note that there may be some better design solutions than using dynamic_cast. But at least this is one possibility.