Question

I’m working with a CMS, Joomla, and there’s a core class which renders a set of parameters to a form, JParameter. Basically it has a render() function which outputs some table-laden HTML which is not consistent with the rest of my site.

For issues of maintainability, and because I have no idea where else this is being used, I don’t want to change the core code. What would be ideal would to be able to define a new class which extends JParameter and then cast my $params object down to this new sub class.

// existing code -------------------- class JParameter {     function render() {         // return HTML with tables     }     // of course, there's a lot more functions here }  // my magical class ----------------- class MyParameter extends JParameter {     function render() {         // return HTML which doesn't suck     } }  // my code -------------------------- $this->params->render();    // returns tables $this->params = (MyParameter) $this->params;  // miracle occurs here? $this->params->render();    // returns nice html 

Answer 1

There’s always PECL’s Classkit but I get a feeling that you’d really rather not do this. Assuming you’re directly calling $this->params->render(), you might just want to make a function/object that does an alternate rendering ( MyParamRenderer::render($this->params)) and avoid performing OO gymnastics not natively supported by the language.