Is there a way to access the private parts of another instance of the same class template?

Question

In my ongoing adventure with templates, I template my Container class not only on the ItemType that it has, but also on the Functor argument, which determines how it should arrange the elements. So far so good.

A small problem that I encountered occurs when I want to copy the contents of one container to another: if two containers have different Functor types, then they are technically unrelated classes. Thus, container A is not allowed access to the non-public contents of container B. Is there a good way to handle this problem, except to do everything I need to access the public? Some kind of "friend" ad template perhaps?

Sample code to demonstrate the problem:

#include <stdio.h>

class FunctorA {};
class FunctorB {};

template <class ItemType, class Functor> class MyContainer
{
public:
   MyContainer() : _metaData(0) {/* empty */}

   template<class RHSFunctor> void CopyFrom(const MyContainer<ItemType, RHSFunctor> & copyFrom)
   {
      _metaData = copyFrom._metaData;
      _item     = copyFrom._item;
   }

private:
  int _metaData;
  ItemType _item;
};

int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
   MyContainer<void *, FunctorA> containerA;
   MyContainer<void *, FunctorB> containerB;

   containerA.CopyFrom(containerB);  // error, containerA::CopyFrom() can't access containerB private data!
   return 0;
}

Answer 1

You can create a basic template template created only on ItemType, save the data there, create a full-fledged subclass of the 2-args subclass to be based on, and place the copy in the base class, since it does not depend on the functor anyway. I.e:.

template <class ItemType> class MyContainerBase
{
public:
   MyContainerBase() : _metaData(0) {/* empty */}

   void CopyFrom(const MyContainerBase<ItemType> & copyFrom)
   {
      _metaData = copyFrom._metaData;
      _item     = copyFrom._item;
   }

protected:
  int _metaData;
  ItemType _item;
};

template <class ItemType, class Functor> class MyContainer:
    public MyContainerBase<ItemType>
{
  // whatever you need here -- I made the data above protected
  // just on the assumption you may need to access it here;-)
};

Answer 2

As you noticed, you can also use the friend function:

class FunctorA {};
class FunctorB {};

template <class ItemType, class Functor> class MyContainer
{
public:
  MyContainer() : _metaData(0) {/* empty */}

  template<class CmnItemType, class LHSFunctor, class RHSFunctor>
  friend void Copy(const MyContainer<CmnItemType, LHSFunctor> & copyFrom
    , MyContainer<CmnItemType, RHSFunctor> & copyTo);

private:
  int _metaData;
  ItemType _item;
};

template<class CmnItemType, class LHSFunctor, class RHSFunctor>
void Copy(const MyContainer<CmnItemType, LHSFunctor> & copyFrom
  , MyContainer<CmnItemType, RHSFunctor> & copyTo)
{
  copyTo._metaData = copyFrom._metaData;
  copyTo._item     = copyFrom._item;
}


int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
  MyContainer<void *, FunctorA> containerA;
  MyContainer<void *, FunctorB> containerB;

  Copy(containerB, containerA);
  return 0;
}