Question

Inside a container object, I have created a class Factory, that is responsible for assembling 2 different types of arrays: one that contains multiple foo objects, and the other that contains multiple bar objects.

I was planning to call them like:

$this->foos = Factory::assemble_foos().

$this->bars = Factory::assemble_bars().

The Factory would also theoretically be called to update/delete explicitly declared objects/attributes, as such:

eg. Factory::destroy_bar( $bar_id )

eg. Factory::update_foo( $foo_id, $attr, $val )

But I’m fairly new to OOP and PHP, and am curious about my approach–I realized that the Factory class is purely managerial, and that it’s never meant to be instantiated (or at least never instantiated more than once.)

Is there something ‘bad practice’ about this approach of having a class that’s exclusively static methods, and maybe some static attributes? Should I be re-working my code so that my container object instantiates a Factory, and make my methods instance methods?

Thanks

Answer 1

That is a common practice in PHP, it allows you to faux namespace functions.

One thing you may want to do is make __construct() private so it can’t ever be instantiated.