Question

This is my current system for a framework that I’m making:

I create an object upon a request to access a non-existing property, that has the name of an existing class through the __get function defined in the Core class. The Core class extends every class.

So it works like this:

class Someclass extends Core
{
    public function classmethod()
    {
        $this->otherclass->method();
    }
}

This works exactly how I want it to work. However, I have no idea (after a lot of frustration) how to edit/create properties of the object, using this system.

So something like this would’t work.

$this->view->somevar = "newvalue"; // this doesn't work. 

I guess it has to do something with the __set function, but I failed to find out.

I received the following suggestions how to tackle this problem:

Dependency injection, Namespaces, Singleton pattern.

I would love to see how to implement what I’m trying to do using one of these patterns.

I have no idea which to choose in order to achieve my simple problem: Use objects in other classes, so i don’t need to put anything into __construct’s parameters or using global variables.

I am using __autoload.

I hope i can tackle this problem with your help.

Answer 1

First of all, the architecture you’re attempting is extremly bad. Aparently you are using “magic” to create objects attached as properties to other objects. Which is bad, because if you use _get/_set, you will end up in problems sooner rather than later. Also extending from a common parent is a bad thing because it generates huge inheritance trees, and it allows most of the objects to have more than one responsability.

Before starting a framework, you might want to look over: SOLID

Now coming back to your question, if you use __get for getting a value, you can as well use __set for setting a value.

__construct method is there in order to allow you to initialize the object with all the data it needs in order to fulfill his sole purpose. Avoiding the __construct is kinda stupid, and defeats the purpose. You might want to pay attention to the D in SOLID in order to see what Dependency Inversion really is and to understand it.

Using __set loses completely the ability to typehint interfaces and so on. Therefore the code can become really buggy and ijcredibly hard to follow, since the flow is not so well defined, and the allocation is done in the back via magic. Also i can come up with 1 million other reason for which the architecture you are trying to use is wrong, but i will leave that for another time.