Question

Sorry, for the badly phrased title. I don’t know much object-oriented PHP, so, I couldn’t come up with a better title (or an answer to my problem!).

Ok, so, I have something like this:

Class foo{
    var $hello;
    function foo(){
    }
}

Class customfoo extends foo{
    //No Constructor
}

Now, I wrote another class, let’s call it customclass and I want to use it in the customfoo class. But, I don’t just want to use it in the customfoo class, I want it to be created as soon as the customfoo class is created.

Ordinarily, I presume, you would just use the constructor for this, so something like:

 Class customfoo extends foo{
    var $custom;
    function customfoo(){
        $this->custom = new customclass();   
    }
}

However, customfoo is a child class, so, I think the constructor would replace the constructor of the parent class, and I don’t want that to happen. So, how can I make a class customclass when customfoo is first started? I guess, I could just write an arbitrary function and call it via some other function (that I am sure gets executed early on), but it would be nice to at least know how to do the above.

Answer 1

First, you should name your counstructors as __construct.

As you have pointed out, the constructor you write will overwrite the parent’s one, but you can always call it from the child class, like this:

Class customfoo extends foo{
    var $custom;
    function __construct(){
        parent::__construct();
        $this->custom = new customclass();
    }
}