c++ - "Field has incomplete type" error

Question

There is an error in my header file:

field "ui" has incomplete type.

I have tried making ui a pointer, but that doesn't work. I don't think I need to do that because I have already defined my MainWindowClass in the namespace Ui. This is my mainwindow.h:

#ifndef MAINWINDOW_H
#define MAINWINDOW_H

#include <QtGui/QMainWindow>
#include "ui_mainwindow.h"

namespace Ui {
    class MainWindowClass;
}

class MainWindow : public QMainWindow
{
    Q_OBJECT

    public:
        MainWindow(QWidget *parent = 0, Qt::WFlags flags=0);
        ~MainWindow();

    public slots:
        void slideValue(int);
    private:
        Ui::MainWindowClass ui; //error line
};

#endif // MAINWINDOW_H

Answer 1

You are using a forward declaration for the type MainWindowClass. That's fine, but it also means that you can only declare a pointer or reference to that type. Otherwise the compiler has no idea how to allocate the parent object as it doesn't know the size of the forward declared type (or if it actually has a parameterless constructor, etc.)

So, you either want:

// forward declaration, details unknown
class A;

class B {
  A *a;  // pointer to A, ok
};

Or, if you can't use a pointer or reference....

// declaration of A
#include "A.h"

class B {
  A a;  // ok, declaration of A is known
};

At some point, the compiler needs to know the details of A.

If you are only storing a pointer to A then it doesn't need those details when you declare B. It needs them at some point (whenever you actually dereference the pointer to A), which will likely be in the implementation file, where you will need to include the header which contains the declaration of the class A.

// B.h
// header file

// forward declaration, details unknown
class A;

class B {
public: 
    void foo();
private:
  A *a;  // pointer to A, ok
};

// B.cpp
// implementation file

#include "B.h"
#include "A.h"  // declaration of A

B::foo() {
    // here we need to know the declaration of A
    a->whatever();
}