Question

I have these classes:

class User{
    private $user_ID;
    private $first_name;
    private $surname;
    ...

    private $website;
    private $company;

    function __construct($array){
        $this->user_ID            = $array["userId"];
        $this->first_name         = $array["first"];
        $this->surname            = $array["last"];
        $this->telephone          = $array["tele"];
        ...
    }
    public function addWebsite($array){
        $this->website = $array;
    }
    public function addCompany($array){
        $this->company = $array;
    }
    public function getData(){
        $array = array();
        foreach($this as $var => $value) {
            $array[$var] = $value;
        }
        return $array;
    }
}

class Website{
    private $webId;
    private $url;
    private $description;
    ...

    function __contruct($array){
        $this->webId           = $array["webId"];
        $this->url             = $array["url"];
        $this->description     = $array["desc"];
        ...
    }
}

the getData() method in User is exactly the same for the Website class.

so how can i get the website class to implement this method? But ONLY the getData() method

Answer 1

While inheritance forms an behaves-as relationship, this is not a situation for Inheritance. Your Website is not related to the User in any way, so there shouldn’t be a relationship between them.

Having base classes like suggested elsewhere here will quickly lead to monolithic architecture and god objects. Those in turn lead to less maintainability, high coupling, fragile code and hampers reuse. Likewise, making everything public or resorting to similar means that defeat information hiding and widen the public API lead to similar problems and you will want to avoid them.

What you are looking for is Traits, but these are only supported as of PHP 5.4. The easiest approach is really just to duplicate that method in both classes. Keep in mind that you usually want to avoid code duplication, but in this case its the lesser evil over the other suggested alternatives.

A viable alternative would be to use an Introspection Service that uses Reflection to fetch the data from the object into an array. Although in general, you should put methods on the objects having the data the methods operate on.