Question

My Chart class actually allows me to create simple properties (of type string, boolean and so on) as well as nested object properties calling the magic __call method this way:

$chart = new Chart();
$chart->simple = 'Hello';
$chart->newComplex();

var_dump($chart);

Output:

object(Chart)[1]
  public 'simple' => string 'Hello' (length=5)
  public 'complex' => 
    object(stdClass)[2]

I’d like to add the ability to create also nested object properties as children of other properties (not children of chart itself) in a way like this:

$chart->newComplex2($chart->newComplex1());

Question is: how to use $args parameter and modify __call() to accomplish this?

class Chart
{

    public function __call($name, $args)
    {

        $type  = substr($name, 0, 3);
        $field = lcfirst(substr($name, strlen($type)));

        switch($type)
        {
            case 'get': return isset($this->$field) ? $this->$field : null;
            case 'new': return $this->$field = new stdClass();
        }

    }

}

Answer 1

I found solution by myself. The trick is to pass the parent property to __call. Here is the code:

public function __call($name, $args)
{

    $type  = substr($name, 0, 3);
    $field = lcfirst(substr($name, strlen($type)));

    switch($type)
    {
        case 'get':
            return isset($this->$field) ? $this->$field : null;
        case 'new':
            return (isset($args[0]) ? $args[0]->$field = new stdClass()
                : $this->$field = new stdClass());
        default: return $this->$name();
    }

}