Question

I’m looking at Doctrine 2 and Symfony documentation for creating a model class.There are several code snippets where a getProperty and setProperty is used within the class, and these are somehow used automatically when a value is assigned directly to the property. This is different then the typical get/set magic methods, and the sample code I have come across does not implement any custom magic methods, so I believe this is handled by Doctrine somewhere.

From what I’ve read, Doctrine implements accessors and mutators. Maybe I missed a package when downloading Pear, or maybe I’m not including something in my script.

For example:

class User {

    public $name;
    public function getName()
    {
        // Do stuff
    }
}

$user = new User();
$foo = $user->name; // getName is called

Note: I’m looking for a Doctrine specific solution. I know this can be done in someway with PHP, but I want to use Doctrine’s native functions.

Edit: Updated to clarify how this differs from typical get/set magic methods, and note.

Answer 1

class User {
    private $name;
    public function __get($property) {
        $methodName = "get".ucfirst($property);
        if (method_exists($this, $methodName)) {
           return call_user_func(array($this, $methodName));
        } elseif (isset($this->{$property})) {
            return $this->{$property};
        }
        return null;
    }
    public function __set($property, $value) {
        $methodName = "set".ucfirst($property);
        if (method_exists($this, $methodName)) {
            call_user_func_array(array($this,$methodName), array($value));
        } else {
            $this->{$property} = $value;
        }
    }
    public function getName() {
        return "My name is ".$this->name;
    }
}

$user = new User();
$user->name = "Foo";
$bar = $user->name;
echo $bar; // "My name is Foo"

If there is a method getSomething or setSomething it will be called when accessing the properties directly.

As I read in this documentation page, it is exactly what the code above does what Doctrine does. But it calls the method _set('fieldName', 'value').