Question

I am starting to use decorators in PHP more often these days to modify an object’s behavior at run-time. My problem is primarily one of laziness, we have many legacy classes with tons of methods and the thought of having to re-write/override all of them for each decorator class makes me sad. Does anyone know of a command line utility that exists that would write these decorators for me?

Or maybe there’s a better way to go about this?

Answer 1

From the question I understand you are too lazy to add the other methods, e.g. those that do not modify the decorated instance. For this purpose, you can use use the magic method __call

public function __call($method, $args) {
    return call_user_func_array(
        array($this->decoratedInstance, $method),
        $args
    );
}

You can also add __callStatic, __get and __set as needed. But note that the magic interceptors always incur some performance penalty. If you have a lot of nested decorators, this might be noticable. When in doubt, benchmark.