Properties in PHP - php

Question

Since PHP has no notion of properties like C# what is the best way to expose certain attributes of a class? Is it recommended to have separate get and set functions or should the member variable be made public?
I am designing a class whose objects will be contained in another class. There should be a way to set/get properties of the object.

Answer 1

On the whole I would recommend exposing public variables on your PHP class, except where you need to perform a more complex action, in which case you would use getter and setter functions.
So where you would use this in C#
public string MyProp { get; set; }
I would recommend this in PHP
public $MyProp;

Answer 2

Using public attribute or private with getter/setter will both do the trick.
I will proceed like this :
If the attribute is critical, use a getter and setter like this :
class myClass
{
private $myAttr;
public function getmyAttr()
{
return $this->myAttr;
}
public function setmyAttr($attr)
{
//Do some verification on $attr
$this->myAttr = $attr;
}
}
If the attribute is less critical , you could simply set is visibility to public.
Because of the lack of strong type in php i will always prefer the private attribute with getter and setter. it let you ensure that the attribute is always what it should be (not "1" instead of 1 for example).

Answer 3

It depends, it is not very rare to make attributes public which are not very security sensitive. But if you do want to keep them private you could create something like this:
class withAttributes{
private $property;
public function getPrivateProperty{
return $this->property;
}
}
In the other class:
$object = new withAttributes();
$attribute = $object->getPrivateProperty();
Hope this helps

Answer 4

There's no idiomatic way built in the language, however you could try using the magic __get and __set methods to emulate something simillar.
Consider this pretty dumb example:
Class Foo {
private $bar;
private $baz;
public function __get($name) {
if (property_exists($this, $name)) {
if ($name == 'bar') {
return strtoupper($this->{$name});
} else {
return $this->{$name};
}
}
return null; // this is what php would do, consider throwning an exception instead
}
public function __set($name, $value) {
if (property_exists($this, $name)) {
if ($name == 'bar') {
$this->{$name} = strtolower($value);
} else {
$this->{$name} = $value;
}
}
// we just ignore this call, consider throwing exceptions, or you could make the class open to property addition in runtime too
}
}
$f = new Foo;
$f->bar = 'tickle me elmo';
print $f->bar; // prints uppercase
This way later on, if you decide to implement some read/write logic, you can hook it in the magic methods. From performance standpoint, these magic methods are slower than ordinary method calls, also arguably more surprising for the users of these classes than explicit getter/setter methods.
If you want to create something more like the built-in StdObject or basic array consider implementing the ArrayAccess interface for the [] syntax.