C++ : Confused in dealing with multiple classes

Question

This is the first time i m trying to handle multiple classes in a c++ program and the experience has been really terrible because i have spent many tens of hours just staring at the code and trying to figure out whats wrong. Also, my actual code currently is about 600 lines so I will just put up the relevant code to what bothers me the most and try explain it.

I am having a class for a multiway-search-tree called node. And My aim is to use an AVL tree(class name Avlnode) as an index tree(containing words in a sorted order and address of the corresponding node at every Avlnode) in order to do operations on the multi-way-tree in O(log n) time. Now consider this code fragment

//Basically searches for a string in Avl tree with root t and returns pointer 
//to the   corresponding node in the multi-way tree 

node* Avlnode::Avlsearch(string x,Avlnode* t)
{
    if (t==NULL)
    {
        cout<<"why you search whats not in string";//invalid search
        exit(0);
    }
    else
    {
        if(isLess(x,t->element)) //isLess compares strings and works good
        {                        //element refers to the string stored in Avlnode
            Avlsearch(x,t->left);
        }
        else if (isLess(t->element,x))
        {
            Avlsearch(x,t->right);
        }
        else
        {
            cout<<"found";  
            cout<<t->index->empname;
            return t->index; //its fine till here
        }
    }
}

//basically adds child under the boss in multi-way tree, by searching for the
//address of boss first using the AVL tree

void node::insertunderboss(string child, string boss,Avlnode* obj1)
{
    node* temp=obj1->Avlsearch(boss, obj1->root); //root=root of Avltree
//why is address of temp and t->index not the same??
    cout<<temp;
    cout<<"root current is "<<obj1->root->element;
    cout<<"\n"<<temp->empname; //empname is string stored in node
 //this refuses to work even though t->index->empname worked perfect.
 // in my first function t->index->empname gave me a string
 // I just stored t->index inside temp
 //But temp->empname makes cmd hang. Your program has stopped working. 
    node* c=insertemp(child,temp);
    cout<<"last check";
    obj1->Avlinsert(c,obj1->root);
    return;
}

I hope my question was clear. I thought of passing by reference but I cannot figure out why this does not work, logically it looks alright. Any kind of help would be really appreciated.

Answer 1

Looks like you are missing return statements, this is an improvement

node* Avlnode::Avlsearch(string x,Avlnode* t)
{
    if (t==NULL)
{
    cout<<"why you search whats not in string";//invalid search
    exit(0);
}
else
{
    if(isLess(x,t->element)) //isLess compares strings and works good
    {                        //element refers to the string stored in Avlnode
        return Avlsearch(x,t->left);
        ^^^^^^
    }
    else if (isLess(t->element,x))
    {
        return Avlsearch(x,t->right);
        ^^^^^^
    }
    else
    {
        cout<<"found";  
        cout<<t->index->empname;
        return t->index; //its fine till here
    }
}
}