Question

I need to be able to call a method without having to know whether or not it is static.

For example, this doesn’t work and I would like it to:

class Groups {
    public function fetchAll($arg1, $arg2){
        return $this->otherFunction();
    }
    public static function alsoFetchAll($arg1, $arg2){}
}

$arguments = array('one', 'two');
$result = call_user_func_array(array('Groups', 'fetchAll'), $arguments);
$result = call_user_func_array(array('Groups', 'alsoFetchAll'), $arguments);

I’m getting an error for the instance varirable:

Fatal error: Using $this when not in object context

The reason it doesn’t work is because I need to instantiate the class for the instance variables to work. But my constructor doesn’t take any arguments so I want a quick way to skip this step.

How can I write this so that it doesn’t matter what kind of method it is?

Answer 1

You can do this with Reflection. Assuming you have these variables:

$class = 'Groups';
$params = array(1, 'two');

Then you can create a new instance of the class:

$ref = new ReflectionClass( $class);
$instance = $ref->newInstance();

And call both methods the same way, checking if they’re static or not for completeness:

$method = $ref->getMethod( 'fetchAll');
$method->invokeArgs( ($method->isStatic() ? null : $instance), $params);

$method = $ref->getMethod( 'alsoFetchAll');
$method->invokeArgs( ($method->isStatic() ? null : $instance), $params);

However, you don’t need to make sure they’re static, you can just as easily do this, regardless of whether or not the method is static:

$ref->getMethod( 'fetchAll')->invokeArgs( $instance, $params);
$ref->getMethod( 'alsoFetchAll')->invokeArgs( $instance, $params);

You can see it working in this demo.

Edit: Here is a demo showing that this works with the OP’s use case, without any errors / warnings / notices.