Question

First thing i want to say that it’s not an easy question to explain, so please be patient if it seems confusing.

I have a set of classes like this

class Product {

   public static $static_type = 'product';
   public static $static_table = 'product_table';

   public function __construct($params) { //do some }
}

and then there are the classes News, Events etc

From another class i need to access to those static variables inside these classes in an iterative way. Something like:

//...
if (Product::$static_type) { //do some }
else if (News::$static_type) { //do other }
//...

I want to trasform it in a cycle, like foreach in a way like this (it’s not correct but makes sense to my question)

foreach ($classes as $class) {
  echo $class::$static_type; //brrrr, just to render the idea :)
}

So i think about a singleton/static class that has a static method returning an array of my classes (not instantiated). Like this:

class Conf {

    public function __construct() {
          //nothing
        }

    public static function get_class_array () {

       //how to do this???
    }
}

and then

foreach (Conf::get_class_array() as $class) {
  echo $class::$static_type; //brrrr, just to render the idea :)
}

How i can reach this? I don’t want to instantiate Product, News or others in this case.

Edit: eval is evil, i don’t want to use it. No tricks with get_declared_class, if there’s no way to solve I will use reflection, that i think it’s the more elegant way among the mentioned :(.

Edit: in the meantime i’ll do the Conf::get_class_array() in this way

public static function get_class_array () {
   return array(new ReflectionClass('Prodotto'), new ReflectionClass('News'));
}

and then call it here:

foreach (Conf::get_class_array() as $class) {
  echo $class->getStaticPropertyValue('static_type');
}

Answer 1

I don’t think you can do this. You could however do one of these:

$properties = get_class_vars('Product');
echo $properties['static_type'];

or

$class = new ReflectionClass('product');
echo $class->getStaticPropertyValue('static_type');

Note that in PHP 5.3 echo $class::$static_type; will work (http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.static.php)