Casting base to derived class according to a type flag

I have been writing an event class for my game engine and I came across to the following problem:

Is casting a base class object to a derived class object given a type flag a good programming design?

Let me give you the following simple example. I have this enum holding the categories of the events:

enum DisplayEventType
{
    DET_UNSET,
    DET_WINDOW_EVENT,
    DET_KEYBOARD_EVENT,
    DET_MOUSE_EVENT,
    DET_JOYSTICK_EVENT
};

This is the base class of all the events:

typedef std::unique_ptr DisplayEventDataMP;

class DisplayEvent
{
    private:

        // The type of the display event
        DisplayEventType mType;

        // The data of the event
        DisplayEventDataMP mEventData;

    public:

        // Constructor
        DisplayEvent(DisplayEventType type = DisplayEventType::DET_UNSET, DisplayEventDataMP eventData = std::unique_ptr((DisplayEventData*) 0));

        // Retrieves the event type of the current event
        DisplayEventType GetType() const;

        // Sets the event type of the current event
        void SetType(DisplayEventType type);

        // Retrieves a raw pointer to the event data of the current event
        DisplayEventData* GetEventData() const;

        // Sets the event data of the current event
        void SetEventData(DisplayEventDataMP eventData);
};

This is the base class of the event data:

class DisplayEventData
{
    public:

        // Virtual destructor, for the deallocation of the interface implementors to work
        virtual ~DisplayEventData();
};

And these are the derived classes

```
class WindowEventData : public DisplayEventData
{
// Window event data specific data and methods
};

class KeyboardEventData : public DisplayEventData
{
// Keyboard event data specific data and methods
};

class MouseEventData : public DisplayEventData
{
// Mouse event data specific data and methods
};

class JoystickEventData : public DisplayEventData
{
// Joystick event specifi

Is casting a base class object to a derived class object given a type flag a good programming design?

Usually no.

It usually indicates a badly defined interface in your base class.

A better way to do it will depend on what you want you want to do with it. If you can define an abstract interface with virtual functions that would be the normal way of solving this problem.

But you seem to be using DisplayEventData as simply a bag of properties so maybe there is no generic interface. In which case I would go with a union (but that choice could change quickly based on other information).

struct DisplayEventData   // struct because it is a property bag not a real class.
{
     DisplayEventType   type;
     union
     {
            WindowEventData   win;
            KeyboardEventData key;
            MouseEventData    mouse;
            JoystickEventData joy;
     } data;
};

PS:

This is the wrong cast:

KeyboardEventData* kev = static_cast(ev.GetEventData());

You should be using dynamic_cast

StackExchange Code Review Q#56363, answer score: 7