Trouble with class prototyping in C++

Question

Basically my code has 2 classes:

class teacher { 
    //has object of class course
};
class course { 
    //has object of class teacher
};

This wasn't working, as teacher was not able to access class course because it is written after class teacher. So then I tried creating class prototypes.

class teacher;
class course;
.....
class teacher {
    //object of class course
};
class course {
    //object of class teacher
};

Still doesn't work. And yes i do need these classes to hold each others objects. Pleasee tell me this can work the way I want it too, and I don't have to change my code. Would really appreciate some help. Thank you.

Answer 1

I think you should view this as a database issue.
Let's have another table containing teachers and courses:

class Teacher_Course
{
  Teacher t;
  Course c;
}

The table could be represented as:

std::vector<Teacher_Course> tc_table;

The picture would be:

+---------+----------+  
| Teacher | Course   |  
+---------+----------+  
| Schults | Math 1   |  
+---------+----------+  
| Schults | Calculus |  
+---------+----------+  
| Jonez   | History1 |
+---------+----------+  

This schema allows your Teacher and Course classes to be independent. The relationship is modeled by the Teacher_Course class.

Thus eliminating any circular dependencies between Teacher and Course.

Note: to be more database friendly, you may want to have record IDs and research foreign keys