8-bit heap descriptor.

This is a descriptor class which provides a buffer of fixed length, allocated on the heap, for containing and accessing data.

The class is intended for instantiation.

Heap descriptors have the important property that they can be made larger or smaller, changing the size of the descriptor buffer. This is achieved by reallocating the descriptor. Unlike the behaviour of dynamic buffers, reallocation is not done automatically.

Data is intended to be accessed, but not modified; however, it can be completely replaced using the assignment operators of this class. The base class (TDesC8) provides the functions through which the data is accessed.

The descriptor is hosted by a heap cell, and the 8-bit data that the descriptor represents is part of the descriptor object itself. The size of the cell depends on the requested maximum length of the descriptor buffer when the descriptor is created or re-allocated.

It is important to note that the size of the allocated cell, and, therefore, the resulting maximum length of the descriptor, may be larger than requested due to the way memory is allocated in Symbian OS. The amount by which this may be rounded up depends on the platform and build type.

HBufC

TPtr8

TDesC8