Question

In the building process of an array I’m trying to call a function, checkIfNodeExists(). PHP executes this function and gives me the expected result but he still gives me a “Notice”, and I don’t want any kind of errors in my code.

function checkIfNodeExists($input) {
   if (isset($input)) {
      return (string) $input;
   } else {
      return 'null';
   }
}

$array['sections'][] = array (
   'ident'       =>  $section->attributes()->ident,
   'title'       =>  $section->attributes()->title,
   'objective'   =>  checkIfNodeExists($section->objectives->material->mattext)
);

Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in /var/www/OLAT_Connection/QTI-XML-Parser.php on line xx

Now, if I check if “objective” exists OUTSIDE the array, PHP doesn’t give me a notice. But this results in more lines of code because I have to work with an extra variabele and more IF-structures and so on…

Is there any other possibility without adding too much lines of extra code?

Answer 1

It seems that $section->objectives->material->mattext is not properly defined. I would start looking there to see if you have errors in the initialisation of the object.

It would be better if you posted more code up so we can see what exactly is going on in this script.

The solution may require more code (albeit unlikely in this case), this is by no means a bad thing. Less code is not necessarily better or more efficient! Obviously it goes without saying that fewer lines of code will (most of the time) execute faster, but this does not make it more secure or efficient

UPDATE

You may be able to simply do this instead of calling another function:

'objective' => isset($section->objectives->material->mattext) ? (string)$section->objectives->material->mattext : null

I have not tested this and cannot remember whether you can place conditional statements inline, so cannot be sure whether it will work but if it does then this will be more efficient, and it is less code!