How to marshal following native C++ objects to C++/CLI? - interop

Question

I am a bit confused on how to marshal below mentioned C++ object to c++/CLI. Could you give me some idea?
Native C++ Classes
class HeaderMessage {
double timestamp;
string ric_code;
}
class TradeMessage {
double price;
int size;
}
class RFARecord
{
public:
RFARecord();
HeaderMessage * hMsg;
list<TradeMessage *> qMsgs;
};
My C++/CLI classes look like this
public ref class RFARecordRef
{
public:
RFARecordRef();
RFARecordRef(RFARecord *record);
HeaderMessageRef hMsg;
List<TradeMessageRef> tMsgs;
private:
RFARecord *record;
};
ref class HeaderMessageRef
{
private:
HeaderMessage *hMsg;
public:
HeaderMessageRef(void);
};
ref class TradeMessageRef
{
private:
TradeMessage *tMsg;
public:
TradeMessageRef(void);
};
I am not sure if my approach is correct.
I read data from a text file and transfer this data in the form of RFARecords to my C# program.
What is the right way to wrap or marshal above data objects to C++/CLI which can then be consumed by my C# program.
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Alok

Answer 1

If I understand correctly. Your biggest task is going to be marshaling the strings from c++ strings into System::String^ objects.
What your going to do is declare a method in the C++/CLI class that returns a type System::String^ like so:
System::String^ get_str_from_cpp()
{
std::string str = ptr_to_native_cpp_class->get_str();
System::String^ ret_str = std_str2sys_str(str);
return ret_str;
}
The std_str2sys_str method looks like so.
static System::String^ std_str2sys_str(std::string std_str)
{
System::String^ sys_str = gcnew System::String(std_str.c_str());
return sys_str;
}
Of course you could use a char* to if you wanted to.
The "ptr_to_native_cpp_class" variable should be a class variable that points to an instance of your native c++ class. It appears you already have those.
There are also ways to marshal from the System::String^ to std::string or char* which are on the net. Hopefully this example helps though. You don't have to worry about marshalling basic types like ints or bools though, you can just return them directly from your C++/CLI layer to the C#.
To answer the question of marshalling an structure over to C++/CLI; I don't think there is a way to automatically marshal an entire custom structure, even if it is composed completely of basic types. What I do in my code is just write a wrapper object that has specific get methods for each data member like so:
//Native C++ class
class data_container
{
public:
int var1;
int var2;
}
//C++/CLI class
public ref class cli_data_container
{
public:
get_var1() {return data_ptr->var1;}
get_var2() {return data_ptr->var2;}
private:
data_container* data_ptr;
};
If there is an automatic way to do this that would be nice, but we had an intern make these interfaces for us for a few dozen utility classes last summer and they get the job done.