Question

I am having some headaches regarding method chaining for a quite simple PHP class that returns a value, which sometimes need to go through a decryption process:

$dataset = new Datacontainer;
$key = $dataset->get('key');
$key2 = $dataset->get('key')->decrypt();

The get method is where the return lives. So the call to the decrypt method on the second row isn’t going to work in its current state.

Can I do something to setup the get method to return only when nothing is chained to it, or what would be the best way to re-factor this code?

Answer 1

The get() method doesn’t actually know whether anything is chained to it or not; but if the get() method returns nothing (null) PHP will complain about the attempt to call the decrypt() method on a non-object.

What you could do is pass an additional argument into the get() method that indicates whether it should return a value, or the object with the decrypt method.

$key = $dataset->get('key');
$key2 = $dataset->get('key',true)->decrypt();