Question

I will be building a system where a particular object will originate from a web service (SOAP based). It will then be displayed on a web page (via PHP). Under certain circumstances we’ll store a copy with some additional information in a local MySQL database. And from there it will be batch processed into Salesforce CRM (again via PHP). We may also subsequently pull the object out of Salesforce for display online. So alot going on. For the most part the object is the same with each subsequent node in the system likely adding a couple of fields specific to it, unique ids mainly.

I’d initially toyed with the idea of encapsulating all the necessary functionality into the one class in PHP which would deal with reading and writing from each of the appropriate sources. This felt like it was over complicating the class, and not a good approach.

I then looked at having just a container class, with no real functionality attached beyond getters and setters. Then creating separate functionality outside of this to deal with the reading and writing between the different sources, simple enough code although tedious to map between all the different field names across the different sources. There is probably a design pattern or two that apply here, but I’m not familiar with them. Any and all suggestions on how to approach this appreciated.

Answer 1

I think they may be several ways to handle that. @EGL 2-101 adapter idea is one way to do it.

Basically, you have several sources, which in O.O. jargon, are different objects. But, you want to treated like if they where a single object.

You may want to make a single class for each source, test the “connection”, as if each case was the only way you where going to work with. When you have several of that classes, try to make all classes share some interface, methods or properties:

class AnyConnection 
{
    public function __construct() {
        // ...
    }

    public function read() {
        // ...
    }

} // class


class SOAPObject extends AnyConnection
{
    public function __construct() {
        // ...
    }

    public function read() {
        // ...
    }

} // class

class MYSQLObject extends AnyConnection
{
    public function __construct() {
        // ...
    }

    public function read() {
        // ...
    }

} // class

class SalesObject extends AnyConnection
{
    public function __construct() {
        // ...
    }

    public function read() {
        // ...
    }

} // class

Later, use a single class to wrap to all of these source classes.

class AnyObject extends AnyConnection
{
    $mySOAPObject;
    $myMYSQLObject;
    $mySalesObject;

    public function __construct() {
        // ...
    }

    public function read() {
        // ...
    }

} // class

Later, add the code, to select which “connection” you want.