How best to initialise this class? - php

Question

On my site at the beginning of every script I include a "bootstrap" script which queries a few things from the database, does some calculations and then loads the variables into constants that I define one by one.
Some examples are:
define("SITE_ID", $site_id); // $site_id is pulled from a field in the database
define("SITE_NAME", $site_name);
// pulled from a field in the same row as the above
define("STOCK_IDS", $stock_ids);
//computed array of stock id integers from a different query.
//I perform logic on the array after the query before putting it in the definition
define("ANALYTICS_ENABLED", false);
// this is something I define myself and isnt "pulled" from a database
Now, I have many functions on the site. One example function is get_stock_info. And it references the STOCK_IDS constant.
What I want to do is have a class which has the above constants in it and the get_stock_info function.
Would the best approach to be have an empty class "site", create an instance of it and then afterwards define the static variables above one by one? Or is that not a good way and should I move all of of my logic which pulls from the database and calculates SITE_ID, STOCK_IDS, ANALYTICS_ENABLED etc into the constructor instead?
Ultimately I want the class to contain all of the above info and then I would be able to use class methods such as site::get_stock_info() and those methods will have access to the constants via self:: or this.
There's a lot more I want to do than that but that would give me enough to figure the rest out.

Answer 1

I think this approach isn't the best. You should consider not using constants as your values aren't constant. For your case it is better to have a class with classic getters methods.
Something like this:
class SiteInfo
{
private $siteId;
private $siteName;
private $stockIds;
private $analyticsEnabled;
public function __construct()
{
// Results from the database
$results = $query->execute();
$this->siteId = $results['siteId'];
$this->siteName = $results['siteName'];
$this->stockIds = $results['stockIds'];
$this->analyticsEnabled = $results['analyticsEnabled'];
}
public function getSiteId()
{
return $this->siteId;
}
public function getSiteName()
{
return $this->siteName;
}
public function getStockIds()
{
return $this->stockIds;
}
public function isAnalyticsEnabled()
{
return $this->analyticsEnabled;
}
}