Question

Is there a way to get the actual calling object from a method?

For example, I have a scenario where I do something like this:

$user = new User;
$user->setName('name');
$user->save($user);

Instead of passing the $user to the save method, it would be nice to just have it get the calling object information.

I know I can do get_called_class() but that doesn’t return the actual object’s data. I was also looking at PHP’s Reflection classes but didn’t see anything exactly right.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Within your object (and thus from within the save function itself, you can utilize the $this keyword to access the object itself. Alternatively…

public static function getInstance() { 

  if(!self::$instance) { 
    self::$instance = new self(); 
  } 

  return self::$instance; 

} 

Where instance would be a private member variable. Make sure your constructor is private so that your object cannot be instantiated externally. <— all this assuming php5.