is this a good use case for std::any?

[rozick1]

Hi

I am writing a class which will have different members e.g.

class x{
std::string nm;
unsigned int id;
}

However, I am aware that users of the class may wish to store their own custom data in an object instantiating the class e.g.

std::string date_of_birth;

I think one way of doing this is by using std::any:

class x{
std::string nm;
unsigned int id;
std::any custom_data;

void setCustomData(std::any anything) {
  custom_data = anything;
}

};

Is this a good use case for std::any? Are there any other options I should be considering? I assume that the user could instead inherit from my class but this does seem overkill to simply store extra data.

One problem is that I had wanted to save the data in the class to an XML file. I assume that it won't be possible to save the std::any variable to an XML file.

Thanks

[zapshe]

This isn't really a good use for std::any. Handling their custom data will be very difficult. Is it a string? Is it a number? Is it a bool? You don't know, and it's very hard to see how it would be helpful to the program.

You can always do this, but it'll be a pain, and you can't predict how the user will want this information used to create logical functions for it.