Question

Is it a good idea to replace getter and/or setter methods with a single method handling both?

For example:

    function name($what = null){

      if(!$what)
        return $this->name;

      $this->name = $what;
    }

Used like:

    // get name
    print $obj->name();

    // set name
    $obj->name('bla');

I’ve seen some frameworks do it. Is it considered a good or bad practice by the community? 😛

It appears to be more efficient, but it looks a little confusing because I’m used to getThing() and setThing() in PHP. This style reminds me of jQuery.

Answer 1

What you could do is create a Get and a Set for all variables in an object.

So instead of the function getName() and getAge()

You can use get(‘name’) or set(‘name’, ‘Foo Bar’);

The functions would look like this:

    public function __set($name, $value) {
    $method = 'set' . $name;
    if (('mapper' == $name) || !method_exists($this, $method)) {
        throw new Exception('Invalid Client property');
    }
    $this->$method($value);
}

public function __get($name) {
    $method = 'get' . $name;
    if (('mapper' == $name) || !method_exists($this, $method)) {
        throw new Exception('Invalid Client property');
    }
    return $this->$method();
}

If you’re looking for a efficient alternative to getters and setters, this might be it.