Dereference operator is not be overloaded

Question

I have defined an overloading dereference operator. But when I try to use -> , I expected that the overloading dereference operator is called and return me the pointer to a specific object. After that I want to access the member of the class of this object. However seems that when I use -> the overloading operator does not be called. It is need to explicity call the olverloading operator -> Have a look in the following example

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
using namespace std;

template<typename  T>
class GenericRequest
{
public:
    GenericRequest()
    {
        m_request = new T();
    }
    ~GenericRequest()
    {
        if (m_request)
        {
            delete m_request;
        }
    }
    T& operator *()
    {
        return *m_request;
    }
    T* operator ->()
    {
        return m_request;
    }
private:
    T* m_request;
};
class SpecificRequest
{
public:

    inline const std::string& getRequest() const {
        return m_request;
    }

    inline void setRequest(const std::string& request) {
        m_request = request;
    }

private:
    std::string m_request;
};

template<typename T>
class ReqData
{
public:
    ReqData()
        :request(NULL)
    {

    }
    ~ReqData()
    {
        if (NULL != request)
        {
            delete request;
        }
    }
    GenericRequest<T>* request;
};

int main()
{
    ReqData<SpecificRequest> q;
    //(q.request)->getRequest();-->This call generates error
    q.request->operator->()->getRequest();

    return 0;
}

Answer 1

Firstly, (q.request)->getRequest(); leads to UB. Because q.request is a pointer and is initialized to null pointer.

For your question, q.request shouldn't be pointer. e.g.

template<typename T>
class ReqData
{
public:
    GenericRequest<T> request;
};

then you can

(q.request)->getRequest();

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