Pass class selection to function

Hi everyone.

I have a question on classes. Can I hand over a Classname to a function, so that the function uses that specific Class?

I could use strings and a switch statement, but is there a simpler way?

See the example below for details on how i want it to work.

Imagine i have a superclass Employes. Employes has an abstract function Setup.

classdef Employe <handle
    properties (Abstract)
        name;
    end
    methods (Abstract)
        Setup(Obj,Name,arg)     
    end
end

I have two subclasses to Employe, one being Salesman, the other Developer. Both have a custom Setup function.

classdef Salesman < Employe
    properties
        sold=0;
    end
    methods
        function Setup(Obj,Name,arg)
            arguments
                Obj Salesman;
                Name string;
                arg.sold int =0;
            end
            Obj.name=Name
            Obj.sold=arg.sold;
        end
    end
end

classdef Developer < Employe
    properties
        language="";
    end
    methods
        function Setup(Obj,Name,arg)
            arguments
                Obj Salesman;
                Name string;
                arg.language string ="";
            end
            Obj.name=Name
            Obj.language=arg.language;
        end
    end
end

Now i want to setup my staff in a serperate function that creates an array of one kind of employes.

function Staff=CreateStaffArray(EmployeType,length)
    Staff=EmployeType.empty(length,1)
    %followed by some filling of Staff
    .
    .
    .
end

Where EmployeType would either be Developer or Salesman.

Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

[Matt J]

It seems to me your setup functions should be converted to class constructors that accept zero input arguments. There is no point having argument validation if you are just going to be assigning the values to properties. You can do the validation in the property defintion blocks instead.

classdef Employe <handle
    properties (Abstract)
        name String;
    end

end

classdef Salesman < Employee
    properties
        sold=0;
    end
    methods
        function Obj=Salesman(Name,sold)
            
             if ~nargin, return; end
            
            Obj.name=Name;
            Obj.sold=sold;
        end
    end
end

classdef Developer < Employee
    properties
        language String ="";
    end
    methods
        function Obj=Developer(Name,language)
            
           if ~nargin, return; end
            Obj.name=Name;
            Obj.language=language;
        end
    end
end

Once you've done this, you could simply use feval() to invoke the constructor that you want:

function Staff=CreateStaffArray(EmployeeType,N)

    Staff(N)=feval(EmployeeType);
    
    %followed by some filling of Staff
    .
    .
    .
end

[Florian Rössing]

Thank you very much for helping out.

Works fine in principle. I can create the needed array like this. However all Staff(i) entries are now the same. Whenever I change one of them, they all change. Like Matlab tries to save storage and just dublicates one Staff member N times instead of making N staff members

[Matt J]

The simplest way to fix that is to make Employee a value class (instead of handle). Otherwise, you must use a loop and construct each Staff(i) individually.