Some more syntactic sugar with the "with" statement? - php

Question

I like PHP, but I miss some of the constructs from other languages that although don't do anything for performance, make the code look cleaner and possibly more maintainable. I'm thinking of Visual Basic days and the "with" statement.
So ideally in PHP we could do this:
with($myWellDescribedInstance) {
->property1="string";
->property2=1;
->property3=2;
->myMethod();
}
Instead of
$myWellDescribedInstance->property1="string";
$myWellDescribedInstance->property2=1;
$myWellDescribedInstance->property3=2;
$myWellDescribedInstance->myMethod();
Is there anything like this in PHP?

Answer 1

You can implement a fluent interface on any class just by having a function return $this.
This is mostly used for setters, but of course it works for any method for which you would normally not have a return value.
For example:
class Person
{
protected $name = '';
protected $surname = '';
protected $email = '';
public function getName()
{
return $this->name;
}
public function getSurname()
{
return $this->surname;
}
public function getEmail()
{
return $this->email;
}
public function setName($name)
{
$this->name = $name;
return $this;
}
public function setSurname($surname)
{
$this->surname = $surname;
return $this;
}
public function setEmail($email)
{
$this->email = $email;
return $this;
}
}
Usage:
$person = new Person;
$person->setName('John')
->setSurname('Doe')
->setEmail('johndoe#email.com');
Of course, calling the method (for example) setName or withName would be entirely up to you.
Another idea might be to have both a setName method (which doesn't return anything) and a withName method (which returns $this), but that might be a bit of an overkill.

Answer 2

If you use "setters" instead of direct property access you can chain methods.
class A {
private $a;
private $b;
public function setA($a)
{
$this->a = $a;
return $this;
}
public function setB($b)
{
$this->b = $b;
return $this;
}
public function doSomething()
{}
}
$a = new A();
$a->setA('a')
->setB('b')
->doSomething();