How to enforce shared behavior for subtype constructors of abstract type

General Usage
3

I’m not sure if this answers your question, but just from the point of view of dispatch you can do things like:

julia> abstract type Layoutable end

julia> struct Axis<:Layoutable
           label::String
           position::Float64
       end

julia> (::Type{T})(figure) where {T<:Layoutable} = T("x", 0.0)

julia> Axis(nothing)
Axis("x", 0.0)

This of course is a silly example, but I imagine something like

function (::Type{T})(figure) where {T<:Layoutable}
    # do generic stuff before specific implementation, then
    specific_stuff(T, figure)
    # do generic stuff after specific implementation
end

And then for every layoutable (e.g. Axis) you just overload specif_stuff(::Type{Axis}, figure).

2 Likes