Question

Basically my question is as stated in the title…

I want to give users the ability to define an alias for the static methods in a class (in my case specifically for MyClass).

I haven’t found anything similar in function to class_alias. Sure, the user could just define their own function that calls the static method to achieve this goal… but are there other/better/simpler/different ways to do this?

Here is my attempt so far…

<?php
class MyClass {

    /**
     * Just another static method.
     */
    public static function myStatic($name) {
        echo "Im doing static things with $name :)";
    }

    /**
     * Creates an alias for static methods in this class.
     *
     * @param   $alias      The alias for the static method
     * @param   $method     The method being aliased
     */
    public static function alias($alias, $method) {
        $funcName = 'MyClass::'.$method;    // TODO: dont define class name with string :p
        if (is_callable($funcName)) {
            $GLOBALS[$alias] = function() use ($funcName){
                call_user_func_array($funcName, func_get_args());
            };
        }
        else {
            throw new Exception("No such static method: $funcName");
        }
    }
}

MyClass::alias('m', 'myStatic');
$m('br3nt');  

Also, feel free to comment on any pros or cons in my approach that I may not have considered. I understand that there are some risks in this approach, such as, the aliased variable could be overridden after the user has defined it.

Answer 1

Perhaps you can make use of the __callStatic “magic” method. See here for details.

I’m not sure how you plan to map between the aliases and the actual static methods, though. Maybe you can have a configuration XML where you specify the mapping and you forward the calls to the real method with __callStatic based on that.