Question

I am not sure if the term “Wildcard” can explain my point, but sometimes in some ready scripts we are able to call a non defined function like find_by_age(23) where age can be anything else that’s mapped to a database table record. So i can call find_by_name, find_by_email, find_by_id and so on. So how can we do such thing either in procedural or object oriented ways ?

Answer 1

The term you are looking for is magic method.

Basically like this:

class Foo {
    public function __call($method,$args) {
        echo "You were looking for the method $method.\n";
    }
}

$foo = new Foo();
$foo->bar(); // prints "You were looking for the method bar."

For what you are looking for, you just filter out bad function calls and redirect good ones:

class Model {
    public function find_by_field_name($field,$value) { ... }
    public function __call($method,$args) {
        if (substr($method,0,8) === 'find_by_') {
            $fn = array($this,'find_by_field_name');
            $arguments = array_merge(array(substr($method,8)),$args);
            return call_user_func_array($fn,$arguments);
        } else {
            throw new Exception("Method not found");
        }
    }
}