Visitor Concepts

The visitor concepts plays the same role in BGL as functors play in the STL. Functors provide a mechanism for extending an algorithm; for customizing what is done at each step of the algorithm. Visitors allow the user to insert their own operations at various steps within a graph algorithm. Unlike the STL algorithms, graph algorithms typically have multiple event points where one may want to insert a call-back via a functor. Therefore visitors do not have a single operator() method like a functor, but instead have several methods that correspond to the various event points. Each algorithm has a different set of event points, which are described by the following visitor concepts:

• BFS Visitor
• DFS Visitor
• Dijkstra Visitor
• Bellman Ford Visitor
• A* Visitor
• Event Visitor