Base class of non exposed derived class in Python side?

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp
Domain
api

Research direction

Reproduce the example using the shown Base, Derived, DerivedTwo, factory, and factoryTwo definitions. Start by reading the Boost.Python class_ registrations, bases declaration, and shared_ptr conversion behavior; compare the returned Python types with and without registering DerivedTwo. Done means the type-selection behavior is explained and the expected handling or scope of a fix is documented.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Hello, I have a use case where a polymorphism factory can instantiate object of a non exposed class. I have a multi-level inheritance scheme and the last level is not exposed to Python. What I try to understand is why the Python object of the last level takes the type of the top-most class in the inheritance hierarchy and not the one just above?

Here is a minimal example to reproduce the behavior:

C++ side

class Base
{
public:
    Base() {}
    virtual ~Base() = default;
};

class Derived: public Base
{
public:
    Derived(int value) { m_value = value; }
    ~Derived() = default;

    int getValue() { return m_value; }

private:
    int m_value;
};

class DerivedTwo: public Derived
{
public:
    DerivedTwo(int value): Derived(value) {}
    ~DerivedTwo() = default;
};

std::shared_ptr<Base> factory()
{
    return std::make_shared<Derived>(9);
}

std::shared_ptr<Base> factoryTwo()
{
    return std::make_shared<DerivedTwo>(99);
}

BOOST_PYTHON_MODULE(mymodule)
{
    using namespace boost::python;

    class_<Base, std::shared_ptr<Base>, boost::noncopyable>("Base", init<>());

    class_<Derived, bases<Base>, std::shared_ptr<Derived>, boost::noncopyable>("Derived", init<int>())
        .def("get_value", &Derived::getValue)
    ;

    def("factory", &factory);
    def("factory_two", &factoryTwo);
}

Python side

import mymodule

obj = mymodule.factory()
print(type(obj))

obj2 = mymodule.factory_two()
print(type(obj2))

Output

<class 'mymodule.Derived'>
<class 'mymodule.Base'> <-- WHY? 

Obviously, if I expose DerivedTwo class, all is OK.
Thanks for your help.

Dominant language
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