For example record like this: property3->property2->property1 is understood for me, this means that property of class, is object of another class, for example:
class a {
public $property1 = "some";
}
class b {
function __construct () {
$this->property2 = new a();
}
}
$obj = new b();
echo $obj->property2->property1;
this understood. but I can not understood records like this: method1()->method2()->method3()
can you post simple example, who using these records?
A simple example :
class A {
function fooA() {
echo "a...";
return $this;
}
function fooB() {
echo "b...";
return $this;
}
function fooC() {
echo "c...";
}
}
$a = new A();
$a->fooA()->fooB()->fooC();
Or with several classes :
class A
{
private $b;
public function __construct()
{
$this->b = new B();
}
public function fooA()
{
echo "A...";
return $this->b;
}
}
class B
{
public function fooB()
{
echo "B...";
}
}
$a = new A();
$a->fooA()->fooB();
It means that these functions return objects. For example, the following is possible (assuming $pdo is a valid PDO object):
$result = $pdo->query("SELECT * FROM `table`")->fetchAll();
This may not always be favorable, because you:
Lose readabiliy.
Lose the ability to use the objects in between.
Lose the ability to check for errors, and you are counting on the methods to return what you think it is.
In this example, you only get the resultset in the form of an array, but you cannot access PDOStatement which is returned by PDO::query(). In this case, it may not matter, in some cases it might.
Also, PDO::query() may return a BOOLEAN false in the case of an error, which would give an unexplained "Method fetchAll() used on an non-object" error.
Related
I don't truly understand how chaining functions work on the values that are returned.
Let's say I have a function that returns a string or array
public static $query;
public static function getArray($arr) {
Database::$query = $arr;
return Database::$query;
}
public function single() {
return Database::$query[0];
}
Why, when I call it can I then not chain a function onto this to affect the string (In this example I was to append ' test' and how would I go about doing this?
Why can I simply not call
Database::getArray(array("test","test2"))->single();
Without getting a Call to a member function single() on array error. But instead, make it return only the first value of the array.
How would I go append doing what I'm trying to achieve here? Why is my logic wrong?
When you call a method, the return value is whatever that method decides to return; the return value doesn't have any automatic relationship with the object you called the method on. For instance:
class A {
public function foo() {
return 'Hello, World!';
}
}
$a = new A;
echo $a->foo();
The value returned is just an ordinary string, just as if foo was a global function not attached to any object.
In PHP, strings (and other "basic types" like arrays) are not objects, so you can't call any methods on them. Even if you could, those methods would be built into the language, and you couldn't just decide that ->single() could be called on any array.
What may be confusing is that some people write methods with the convention that they return an object, known as a "fluent interface", or more generally "chained methods". This is not a feature of the language, just a natural consequence of returning an object from a method:
class A {
public function foo() {
return new B;
}
}
class B {
public function bar() {
return 'Hello, World!';
}
}
$a = new A;
$b = $a->foo(); // $b is a B object
echo $b->bar();
// We can combine this into one line:
echo (new A)->foo()->bar();
There is nothing special about this chaining; it's just that wherever you have an object, you can call appropriate methods on it, just as wherever you have a number, you can do maths with it. Compare with a simple addition:
function foo() {
return 1;
}
$a = foo();
$a = $a + 2;
echo $a;
// We can combine this into one line:
echo foo() + 2;
// Or keep the assignment:
$a = foo() + 2;
echo $a;
The object doesn't know it's being chained - in fact, it shouldn't need to know anything about the code around it, and that's an important part of structured programming.
A common pattern is then to have modifying methods which return the object they just modified, so you can make a series of modifications in one go:
class A {
private $words = [];
public function addWord($word) {
$this->words[] = $word;
// $this is the current object, which is an instance of class A
return $this;
}
public function getString() {
return implode(' ', $this->words);
}
}
$a = new A;
// Calling $a->addWord(...) gives us back the same object
$a = $a->addWord('Hello');
$a = $a->addWord('World');
// Calling $a->getString() gives us back a string
echo $a->getString();
// We can combine this into one line:
echo (new A)->addWord('Hello')->addWord('World')->getString();
Note that you can only refer to $this if you have created an instance of the object (with the new keyword), not in a method declared as static. A static method can still have this kind of pattern, but it will need to return some other object, like new self (a new instance of the current class) or self::$foo (an object created earlier).
it's called fluent interface, if you want to chain methods from same class you have to return this from each of them which you want to call fluently, so your code should look like:
public static $query;
public function getArray($arr) {
Database::$query = $arr;
return $this;
}
public function single() {
return Database::$query[0];
}
after applying changes, the construct Database::getArray(array("test","test2"))->single(); will work, however you may consider renaming method getArray, because as its name suggests, it shouldn't be returning $this, but array
#EDIT
you should change the type of function getArray from public static function to public function to make it work, also your final statement will change to something like:
(new Database())->getArray(array("test","test2"))->single();
however, in this case, I would consider redesigning your class and creating some kind of singleton so that you instantiate Database class only once and store the object somewhere
I want to include this function in a class. This function will essentially json_encode the output of the previous function (I hope that makes sense).
I want to do something like this:
<?php
$app = new App;
// $app->error(); // Should return ['some error', 'some other error']
echo $app->error()->encode(); // Should return {'errors': ['some error', 'some other error']}.
Also what's the correct term for such function? I've been searching but couldn't find anything as I didn't really know what I was looking for.
Thanks!
Edit
I think you got that wrong. It's my mistake I didn't mention it before.
That's just an example. Just like in frameworks like Slim, where you can do something like:
$response->getBody()->write('Something');
I want to do something similar to that. Not just that. I want to learn how it's done.
Here is some boilerplate code you could use. The idea is that you should make the error method return an object of yet another class. That object should then in turn have the encode method.
In your example, you want $app->error() to return an array. For it to behave as an array, we can extend the ArrayObject class.
Secondly, you want that same $app->error() to expose another method encode. So you define that method in that same class mentioned above:
// Extend ArrayObject to make objects behave as arrays
class ErrorMsg extends ArrayObject {
// Add method to return JSON string
public function encode() {
return json_encode(array("errors" => $this->getArrayCopy()));
}
}
class App {
private $error;
public function doSomething() {
// For demo sake, just set an error:
$this->error = ["An error occurred in doSomething", "No further info"];
}
public function error() {
// This is the key: instantiate and return another object
return new ErrorMsg($this->error);
}
}
$app = new App;
// Set an error condition in $app
$app->doSomething();
// Loop over error array
foreach ($app->error() as $index => $error) {
// Display the error
echo "Error $index is: $error\n";
}
// Display the JSON encoding of the same.
echo $app->error()->encode() . "\n";
Output:
Error 0 is: An error occurred in doSomething
Error 1 is: No further info
{"errors":["An error occurred in doSomething","No further info"]}
See it run on eval.in
General idea to chain method calls
In general, when you want your objects to support chained -> notation, you must make sure to define each method as returning yet another object with its own methods. Then those methods can again return objects, with again exposed methods, etc. And so you can chain-call on and on.
So if you want to be able to write:
$a = new A();
$result = $a->b()->c()->d();
...then your code would look something like this:
class D {
// ...
}
class C {
private $d;
public function C() { // constructor
$this->d = new D();
}
public function d() {
return $this->d;
}
}
class B {
private $c;
public function B() { // constructor
$this->c = new C();
}
public function c() {
return $this->c;
}
}
class A {
private $b;
public function A() { // constructor
$this->b = new B();
}
public function b() {
return $this->b;
}
}
Of course, this is just the structure, and you'd pass some specific data to either the constructors and/or methods. But the main idea is that you never return simple types (String, Number, ...), but always objects.
PHP allows for variables to hold functions like so:
$f = function($a,$b) {
print "$a $b";
};
$f("Hello","World!"); //prints 'Hello World!'
This works just fine for me. I'm trying to pass a function into a class and set an instance variable to hold that function but with little luck:
class Clusterer {
private $distanceFunc;
public function __construct($f) {
$this->distanceFunc = $f;
print $f(1,7); //works
print $this->distanceFunc(1,7); //exceptions and errors abound
}
}
$func = function($a,$b) {
return abs($a-$b);
}
$c = new Clusterer($func);
Am I doing something wrong here? The error is that the function doesn't exist so my guess currently is that it looks for a class function with that name (which there isn't one) and then gives up rather than looking for variables as well... how can I make it view the $this->distanceFunc as a variable?
EDIT:
So after the advice from the answers below, I found a solution which was the make a function to wrap the invocation. For example my class is now:
class Clusterer {
private $distanceFunc;
public function __construct($f) {
$this->distanceFunc = $f;
print $f(1,7); //works
print $this->distanceFunc(1,7); //exceptions and errors abound
}
private function distanceFunc($a,$b) {
$holder = $this->distanceFunc;
return $holder($a,$b);
}
}
$func = function($a,$b) {
return abs($a-$b);
}
$c = new Clusterer($func);
and this works great. Php looks for functions first and can only tell if it is a variable by context I guess is the moral of this story.
Your code doesn't work because PHP interprets $this->distanceFunc(1,7) as a class method, but you can do the following:
class Clusterer {
private $distanceFunc;
public function __construct($f) {
$this->distanceFunc = $f;
print $f(1,7); //works
print call_user_func_array($this->distanceFunc, array(1, 7));
// print $this->distanceFunc(1,7); //exceptions and errors abound
}
}
$func = function($a,$b) {
return abs($a-$b);
};
$c = new Clusterer($func);
http://sandbox.onlinephpfunctions.com/code/cdc1bd6bd50f62d5c88631387ac9543368069310
In PHP, methods and properties of an object occupy separate namespaces. This is different from JavaScript, for example, where foo.bar = function() {} is a perfectly valid way of defining a method.
Consequently, $this->distanceFunc(1,7); looks for a method named distanceFunc on the current class, and the classes it inherits from, but never looks for the property which you happen to have given the same name.
One solution is to force PHP to look up a property, then execute it, e.g. $foo = $this->distanceFunc; $foo(1,7) or call_user_func($this->distanceFunc, 1, 7)
Another would be to define the magic method __call on your class, which gets run whenever a non-existent method is referenced. Something like this ought to work (I don't have an easy way to testright now):
function __call($func, $args) {
if ( property_exists($this, $func) && is_callable($this->$func) ) {
return call_user_func_array($this->$func, $args);
}
}
Note that this still isn't the same as a real method, for instance in terms of access to private properties.
It looks like you're going for a strategy pattern here. IE you want to be able to inject different methods for calculating distance? If so there is a more "sane" way to do it.
You can define an interface to the classes you will use to store the strategy method ensuring that the class will always have the method calculate() for example which would be your distance calculation function. Then in the constructor of your Clusterer class, type check against the interface in the parameter and call calculate() on the object passed in.
Looks like this:
interface Calculateable
{
public function calculate();
}
class MyDistanceCalculator implements Calculateable
{
public function calculate()
{
// Your function here
}
}
class Clusterer
{
protected $calc;
public function __construct(Calculateable $calc)
{
$this->calc = $calc;
$this->calc->calculate();
}
}
$myClusterer = new Clusterer(new MyDistanceCalculator());
Because you defined an interface, any object you pass in will have the calculate() function
In HHVM, you can do this:
<?php
class Foo
{
public function __construct()
{
$this->bar = function() { echo "Here\n"; };
($this->bar)();
}
}
new Foo();
But it's not yet supported in PHP. But, it will be in PHP 7 (there will be no release named PHP 6).
PHP doesn't have first class functions. In JavaScript if you returned a function you could do this: myFunctionThatReturnsAFunction()(1,2), but not in PHP.
<?php
class Clusterer {
private $distanceFunc;
public function __construct(Closure $f) {
$this->distanceFunc = $f;
}
public function getDistFunc()
{
return $this->distanceFunc;
}
}
$func = function($a,$b) {
return abs($a-$b);
};
$c = new Clusterer($func);
$a = $c->getDistFunc();
echo $a(1,2);
Take a look at call_user_func
class Clusterer {
private $distanceFunc;
public function __construct($f) {
$this->distanceFunc = $f;
print $f(1,7); //works
print call_user_func($this->distanceFunc, 1, 7); //works too ;)
}
}
$func = function($a,$b) {
return abs($a-$b);
};
$c = new Clusterer($func);
Don't ask me what is the difference, but it works the way you want (One of the reasons i hate this language)
php 5.3
Is there a way to do this (viable in java for example)
(new MyClass())->myMethod();
i am receving: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_OBJECT_OPERATOR in D.. on line 7
Add
I really need that RFC to be implemented in the next PHP version!
http://wiki.php.net/rfc/instance-method-call
Is there a way we can subscribe to it so it can get more attention?
No, its not possible. There is a RFC for that
http://wiki.php.net/rfc/instance-method-call
But no one knows, when this will come to the userland.
Jacob mentioned the static method. There are other more or less useful methods to achieve the same
function instanciate($className, $arg1 = null) {
$args = func_get_args();
array_shift($args);
$c = new ReflectionClass($className);
return $c->newInstanceArgs($c);
}
instanciate('Classname', 1, 2, 3)->doSomething();
However, I prefer the temporary variable (like in the question).
Update:
I can swear there where an example for the temporary variable stuff in the question in the past. However, I meant this
$x = new Class;
$x->method();
where $x is the temporary variable.
That is not valid syntax. A handy way to achieve what you want is to use a static method to create the object.
In your MyClass:
public static function create() {
return new MyClass();
}
Then you can use:
MyClass::create()->myMethod();
However it is extra code that you have to maintain, if for example the constructor is changed or the class is extended. So you need to weigh up the benefits.
You can do something like this:
function chain_statements($statement1, $statement2) { return $statement2; }
class TClass { public Method() { ...; return $this; } }
$b = chain_statements($a = new TClass(), $a->Method());
... or more generalized:
function chain_statements(array $statements) { return end($statements); }
For example:
function chain_statements($statement1, $statement2) { return $statement2; }
function chain_statements2(array $statements) { return end($statements); }
class TClass
{
public $a = 0;
public function Method1() { $this->a = $this->a + 1; return $this; }
public function Method2() { $this->a = $this->a + 2; return $this; }
}
$b = chain_statements($c = new TClass(), $c->Method1()); echo($b->a);
$b = chain_statements2(array($c = new TClass(), $c->Method1(), $c->Method2())); echo($b->a);
... or even better:
function call_method($object) { return $object; }
$b = call_method(new TClass())->Method2(); echo($b->a);
Not as such. In PHP new is not an expression, but a language construct. The common workaround is to provide a static instantiation method for MyClass::get()->... use.
A more concise alternative is a hybrid factory function:
function MyClass() { return new MyClass; }
class MyClass {
...
}
Which then simplifies the instantiation to MyClass()->doSomething();
You can put it in one statement if you really wanted to. Use eval() ;p
But you probably shouldn't.
I had this same problem a while ago but I found this simple solution which is pretty readable too. I like the fact it uses only the standard PHP functions. There's no need to create any utility functions of your own.
call_user_func(
array(new ClassToInstance(), 'MethodName'),
'Method arguments', 'go here'
);
You can also use call_user_func_array to pass the arguments as an array.
call_user_func_array(
array(new ClassToInstance(), 'MethodName'),
array('Method arguments', 'go here')
);
I need to have a variable that only one function can write (let's call that function a) and that only one other function can read (let's call that function b). Is that possible?
You could use a static variable:
function foo($val=null) {
static $var = null;
if (!is_null($var)) $var = $val;
return $val;
}
Here $var is only visible inside the function foo and is maintained throughout multiple calls:
foo(123);
echo foo(); // 123
foo(456);
echo foo(); // 456
Or use a class with a private member and access/modify it with public methods:
class A {
private $var;
public function setVar($val) {
$this->var = $val;
}
public function getVar() {
return $this->var;
}
}
With this the private member var is only visible to a particular instance of this class:
$obj1 = new A();
$obj1->setVar(123);
$obj2 = new A();
$obj2->setVar(456);
echo $obj1->getVar(); // 123
echo $obj2->getVar(); // 456
If you make the member static, then there is just one for the class instead of for each instance:
class A {
private static $var;
public function setVar($val) {
self::$var = $val;
}
public function getVar() {
return self::$var;
}
}
$obj1 = new A();
$obj1->setVar(123);
$obj2 = new A();
$obj2->setVar(456);
echo $obj1->getVar(); // 456
echo $obj2->getVar(); // 456
You can use a static abstract class.
abstract class Settings
{
private static var $_settings = array();
public static function get($key,$default = false)
{
return isset(self::$_settings[$key]) ? self::$_settings[$key] : $default;
}
public static function set($key,$value)
{
self::$_settings[$key] = $value;
}
}
Example Usage:
Settings::set('SiteName',`SomeResult`);
echo Settings::get('SiteName');
Since 5.3.0, you can use anonymous functions as closures. The advantage here, is that you can hold on to b... which is returned by a... and fire it off when you're ready:
<?php
function a()
{
// Only a() can write to $myVar
$myVar = 42;
$b = function() use ($myVar)
{
// $b can read $myVar
// no one else can
return $myVar;
};
return $b;
}
// get $b
$test = a();
// use $b
echo $test();
?>
Another solution before 5.3.0, but here a has to fire b which may not be that practical:
You can simply create an internal variable and pass it as an argument. You can do this inside a class, or just inside simple functions:
function a()
{
// ...
// Write the variable that
// only this function can write to
$thisVar = 1;
b($thisVar);
//...
}
function b($myVar)
{
// ...
// Do stuff w $myVar, a copy of $thisVar
// Changing $myVar has no effect on $thisVar
//
}
Do you mean friend functions? Because I'd love to be able to do that. So far I haven't found an easy way though (although you could try using Reflection, but that seems like way to much effort).
For me, it usually hasn't been an issue of maintaining data integrity / encapsulation, but of keeping the list of public methods (which is kinda like a class's API) free of clutter. A perfect framework should be easy to use, have obvious function names etc etc etc. Methods intended for use by a single other method really mess things up. The "solution" I've taken to is prefixing those function names by one or two underscores and writing "intended for internal use only" or something to that extent in the comments.