Question

Say we have a class with several protected and/or public methods.
I need to perform a check each time a method is called. I could do that check each time i call a method :

class Object
{
    // Methods
}

$o = new Object();

if($mayAccess) $o->someMethod();

or

if($mayAccess) $this->someMethod();

But i would like developers neither to have to think about it nor to write it. I’ve thought about using __call to do :

class Object
{
    public function __call($methodName, $args)
    {
        if($mayAccess) call_user_func_array($this->$methodName, $args);
    }
}

Unfortunatly, if i call the method from inside the class, __call will not invoked as it only works when a non-visible method is called.

Is there a clean way to hide this check for both internal and external calls ? Again the goal is to make sure a developper won’t forget to do it when calling a method.

Thanks in advance 🙂

EDIT :

I have another way of doing this :

class Object
{
    public function __call($methodName, $args)
    {
        if($mayAccess) call_user_func_array($methodName, $args);
    }
}

function someMethod() { }

But i won’t be able to use $this anymore, which means no protected methods, which i do need.

Answer 1

No, I dont think so. What you could do though is write a proxy:

class MayAccessProxy {

    private $_obj;

    public function __construct($obj) {
        $this->_obj = $obj;
    }

    public function __call($methodName, $args) {
        if($mayAccess) call_user_func_array(array($this->_obj, $methodName), $args);
    }
}

This means you have to instantiate a proxy for every object you want to check:

$obj = new MayAccessProxy(new Object());
$obj->someMethod();

Ofcourse you’d also want the proxy to behave exactly like the object itself. So you also have to define the other magic methods.

To make it a bit easier for the developers you could do something like this:

class Object {

    /**
     * Not directly instanciable.
     */
    private __construct() {}  

    /**
     * @return self
     */
    public static function createInstance() {
        $obj = new MayAccessProxy(new self());
        return $obj;
    }
}

$obj = Object::createInstance();