Question

I’m coding an interface class at the moment to manage showing of user comments on two different kinds of pages, one page is the profiles and the other is the media pages.

Both sets of comments are stored in different tables but I’m wondering whether I should use one function or split both tables into a separate function.

Is the overall goal of OOP to have code that works well for your site or to be able to use it over in different sections without the need to modify lots?

I could have:

showComments($pageId, $type, $userType)
{
    if($type == 'media')
        $sql = "SELECT comment FROM mediatable WHERE id=:pageId";
    elseif($type == 'profile')
        $sql = "SELECT comment FROM profileTable WHERE id=:pageId";

    if($userType == 'moderator')
        //show Moderation Tools

    //Rest of code goes here
}

Or I could seperate it into different functions like so:

showMediaComments($id);
moderateMediaComments($id);

showProfileComments($id);
moderateProfileComments($id);

I’m thinking the second method would be better as I could then use the code again easier but it would required more lines of code …

Answer 1

Neither one is proper OOP. A proper way would be to have a abstract Comment class and subclasses MediaComments, ProfileComments that handle the differences. Also, read about the MVC architecture