Question

Let’s say you have abstract class A doing some stuff. Then you have abstract class B doing other stuff.

And lastly a few normal classes, let’s say C … Z.

Both A and B provide functionality that are used by class C .. Z classes. In my case mainly an observer pattern which is static, and some __get magic + lazy-loading for a certain type of properties – this is not static. I’m thinking to merge this into one class, but then I’m sure it violates SRP 🙂

So I am extending A, B in C, D etc… Essentially all C .. Z classes inherit the functionality of the A & B classes. So besides what they are supposed to do, they also do the observer stuff and so on

Does this violate the single-responsability principle?

Answer 1

I don’t know if this applies to your specific case, but I find that most of the time, an abstract class and its implementation can be split into two normal classes.

For example:

abstract class AbstractAdder {
    int AddThree(int a) {
        Add(a, 3);
    }

    abstract int Add(int a, int b);
}

class NormalAdder inherits AbstractAdder {
    int Add(int a, int b) {
        return a + b;
    }
}

var result = new NormalAdder().AddThree(6);

Can be changed into:

class ThreeAdder {
    ThreeAdder(IGenericAdder genericAdder) {
        this.genericAdder = genericAdder;
    }

    int AddThree(int a) {
        return this.genericAdder.Add(a, 3);
    }
}

class NormalAdder implements IGenericAdder {
    int Add(int a, int b) {
        return a + b;
    }
}

var result = new ThreeAdder(new NormalAdder()).AddThree(6);

This has several advantages:

• The classes are less tightly coupled, because they don’t inherit from each other. Because the classes are separate, the responsibilities are more separate and well-defined.
• You can use functionality of multiple classes, whereas you can only inherit from one abstract class. (Edit: apparently not in PHP because you have multiple inheritance)
• It is clearer (IMHO) on which class the method is called.

It seems like you are using inheritance to couple multiple classes, but that is not what inheritance is meant for.