Last time I introduced the DataCollector application, but didn’t have room to get into the use of factory classes. There isn’t often a need for a factory class, but they can be useful when you need to create objects at run-time without knowing their class until then.

The general approach involves a function that returns instances of a class based on run-time information. In some cases the instances are limited to a predetermined set of classes, in other cases it can any class the known to the code.

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