NYCPHP Meetup

[Gary A Mort]

On 2/25/2013 8:46 AM, Chris Snyder wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 7:24 AM, Leam Hall <leamhall at gmail.com 
> <mailto:leamhall at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     OOP Newbie question as I convert a crufty program to OOP
>
>     Class Person sets up various properties of a person. Classes B, C,
>     and D extend A in various ways for different roles people do.
>
>     What I ran into last night was trying to use a function outside of
>     the classes to instantiate objects. For example:
>
>     Function Z instantiates 3 objects of class B, one each object of
>     class C.
>
>     Function Y instantiates one instance of class D and then runs
>     Function Z 3 times, for a total of 16 objects.
>
>     Function X creates one object of Class D and then calls Function 7
>     3 times.
>
>     What I don't know, and couldn't clearly explain on ##php last
>     night, is how to have Functions X, Y, and Z be able to create
>     objects from classes B, C, and D.
>
>     Any help, or good pointers to tutorials? Should I even be using
>     functions? The goal is to create groups of objects based off group
>     membership guidelines.
>
>     If you're well and truly bored, the full code is at:
>
>     https://github.com/LeamHall/LHTraveller_Mercenary_Generator
>
>
> Not so bored, so only took a quick look.
>
> It seems like you're calling functions to generate objects but not 
> returning those objects or storing them in a global array anywhere?
>
> You are absolutely right to be using objects for this stuff.


I'm not so sure, he is "storing" the data for the purpose.  The purpose 
is to create a "group" of "people" based on certain parameters - and 
then display them to the end user.

So each "generate" function outputs it's object data to the screen - 
thus "Storing" the data in the output.

On the downside, one gotcha with this method of generation is that the 
web page will "generate" a new set of data every time it is loaded - so 
if the end user wants to print the data on the screen depending on the 
browser, it may completely resubmit the request so what is on the screen 
would not be what is printed out.


I think you may want to also throw in some migration to using models and 
views as well - so for example
generate_person: today it creates the stats and displays it

Model/View
generate_person: creates a person and returns the object
print_person: displays the person data

generate_squad: creates a squad object which contains an array of person 
objects
print_squad: displays the squad data


Also, as I'm assuming that this is being done as an exercise in learning 
and fun, you should not use global functions like generate_person, 
generate_squad, etc.

You should either be namespacing your functions so as to get them out of 
the global namespace, ie:
traveller/generate/person
traveller/generate/squad

Or you should look into the Factory pattern 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_method_pattern for this sort of thing.

And of course, most important, have fun, since that's what PHP 
programming is all about.

:-)


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