Question

I currently have a function where I’m trying to refer to the $id in the class but it doesn’t work:

public function getCourseInfo($cid = $this->id, $all = false)
{

}

This is my class:

class Course
{
    protected $course;
    protected $id;

    public function __construct($cid)
    {
        $id = $cid;
        $this->course = $this->getCourseInfo($this->id);
    }
    public function getCourseInfo($cid = $this->id, $all = false)
    {

    }
}

Answer 1

Everyone in this thread is giving correct answers but no one gave a full code sample hence I’ll post my suggestion:

class Course
{

    /**
     * @var int
     */
    protected $_courseId;

    /**
     * @var array
     */
    protected $_course;

    /**
     * Class constructor
     *
     * @param int $courseId Course ID
     * @return Course
     */
    public function __construct($courseId)
    {
        $this->_courseId = (int) $courseId;
    }

    /**
     * Get course information
     *
     * @param bool $all ...
     * @return array
     */
    public function getCourseInfo($all = false)
    {
        if ($this->_course === null) {
            // use $this->_courseId as needed
            $this->_course = ... // populate course info
        }

        return $this->_course;
    }

}

As you’ll notice I’ve omitted the course id parameter from getCourseInfo() simply because it’s not needed if you instantiate the class with a course id.

Secondly, I don’t think you should call getCourseInfo in the constructor because the information will only be needed at a later point. Also, I added “caching” to the function so that you don’t fetch data twice.

Obviously there’s a high chance that I could be wrong having not seen your code but I feel this is a better structure of the code.