Question

I am defining a new block to clean up my view like so:

class Jamie_Utilities_Block_Myblock extends Mage_Core_Block_Template
{
    public function getProducts()
    {
        $products = array(
            new Product('Product Name', "image source"),
            new Product('Product Name', "image source"),
        );
        return $products;
    }
}

I would like to create a little Product class in the same file to hold a couple fields. Myblock.php now looks like:

class Jamie_Utilities_Block_Myblock extends Mage_Core_Block_Template
{...}

class Product
{
    public $name;
    public $image;

    public function __construct($name, $image)
    {
        $this->name  = $name;
        $this->image = $image;
    }
}

This works, but is it a good thing to do? Should I be declaring all my classes as models in the module’s config.xml or should I just use a better class name to avoid conflicts e.g. Jamie_Utilities_Block_Product?

Answer 1

The <models> node in your config is a class prefix, not a class name.

An example config of <config><global><models><your_module><class>Yer_Module_Model</class></...> is what’s found when this code is parsed: Mage::getModel('your_module/rest_of_class_name');. The first part is converted to yer_module_model, and the rest is tacked on with a leading underscore, i.e. yer_module_model_rest_of_class_name. According to the autoloader, the system will look for that definition in Yer/Module/Model/Rest/Of/Classname.php.

The short story is this: define your class prefix and you can create as many classes as you want.