Question

Please could someone advise?

We have an abstract base class with a few properties and some methods.

The methods(with parameters) are being called from inherited classes with the common intention of setting the passed parameters to the properties of the base class except they don’t appear to override the default value.

If I set a value(for testing purposes) in the constructor of the abstract(base) class it works fine and anything else passed to the constructor works but what we want to do is get the setErrors method to actually set the value of the property.

Example:

//abstract base class

private $errors = array();//the property we want to overide

public function __construct()
{
$this->errors[] = "This is a required field";//for testing purposes only this works
}

public function setErrors($error)
{
var_dump($error);//this proves that $error is passing something...
$this->errors[] = $error;//this doesnt work(override the property)
var_dump($this->error);//the property now has the $error value...
}

public function getErrors()
{
return "<li>".implode("</li>\n",$this->errors);
}

I’m not sure if this is something to do with the base class being abstract i.e. as it doesnt get instantiated. Please could someone explain why this doesn’t work?
Thanks in advance for taking an interest.

Edit
WE ARE NOT TRYING TO INHERIT THE PRIVATE PROPERTY FROM THE BASE CLASS

What we want to do is override the property with the set method and then use a public get method to return the property.

Answer 1

You should declare $errors as protected instead of private. Read more about Class and Objects visibility 😉

Update:

Ok, maybe I understand your problem now 😛

Try to modify your setErrors like so:

    public function setErrors($error)
    {
        var_dump($error);//this proves that $error is passing something...
        $this->errors = (array) $error;//this works (override the property)
    }