Question

I’m trying to decide whether to create many classes for each content type I have in my application/database or just stick with procedural code.

Version 1:

• make a class for each object collection:

  class App{
  
    protected $user_collection;
  
    function getUserCollection(){
      if(!isset($this->user_collection)
        $this->user_collection = new UserCollection($this);
  
      return $this->user_collection;
    }
  
    // ...
  
  }
  
  class UserCollection{
  
    function __construct(App $app){
      $this->app = $app;
    }
  
    function getUser($user){
      return new User($this->app, $user);
    }
  
    function getUsers($options){
      $users = $this->app->getDatabase()->query($options);
      foreach($users as &$user)
        $user = new User($this, $user);          
      return $users;
    }
  
    // ...
  
  }
  

which I’m using like:

$app = new App();
echo $app->getUserCollection()->getUser('admin')->email_address;

---

version 2:

• keep all methods in a single class

  class App{
  
    function getUsers($options){
      $users = $this->getDatabase()->query($options);
      foreach($users as &$user)
        $user = new User($this, $user);          
      return $users;
    }
  
    function getUser($user){
      return new User($this, $user);
    }
  
    // ...
  
  }
  

used like:

$app = new App();
echo $app->getUser('admin')->email_address;

---

version 3:

• make getUsers() a a static method in the “User” class (the method instantiates a new User object):

  $app = new App();
  echo User::getUser($app, 'admin')->email_address;
  

---

Which way should I go? The “user” object is just an example, App has other objects too, like “database”, “pages” etc.

Answer 1

Personnaly, I often used the second one with method like this:

class user {

    /**
     * Load object from ...
     */
    public function load($userId) {}

    /**
     * Insert or Update the current object
     */
    public function save() {}

    /**
     * Delete the current object
     */
    public function delete() {
        // delete object
        // Reset ID for a future save
        $this->UserID = null;
    }

    /**
     * Get a list of object
     */
    public static function getList() {
        // Make your search here (from DB)
        // Put rows into new "SELF" object
        $list = array();
        foreach($rows as $row) {
            $obj = new self();
            $obj->populate($row);

            $list[$obj->UserID] = $obj; // Associative array or not... 
        }
    }
}

Like you can see, I set my “getList” function static to simply access like this:

$listUsers = user::getList();

OK, it’s very simple but work in most case of simple app.