can i load a class dynamicaly then add it to a class?

[wizhippo]

eg.. something like.....

$myMainClass->loadclass('myclass.class.php');

.....

$myMainClass->myClass->yell('wow');

I want to have a base object that loads modules to extend itself.

any ideas?

[Bo0gi3man]

Class definitions in PHP are still fairly infant. There is no way to do data hiding that I know of yet, eg private public values, which is unfortunate seeing as that would be imperitive in programming a dynamic development environment (security).

But much like any other programming language after you instantiate objects of that class your are stuck with the class definition for the object upon its initialization. The advantage of PHP though, is that it is not a compiled language, it is interpretted. This means that you can pretty do anything that you want as long as it follows a linear pattern.

For your problem I'm not sure exactly what you are looking for. The way you formulate your question it seems like you want to have this object extend the class that you are loading. This is something that sounds very interesting, as inheriting properties from different classes dynamically may be an interesting way to handle some issues.

What I believe you wanted to do though is have an object instantiate a class dynamically. This can be done a couple of ways.

Let's say I have an ObjectContainer class and a 100 different classes which extend a standard object, that is they have inhereted the same parent. Each has a unique name and the one that we want to use is provided to us at runtime in the variable $Class. It's parameters are stored in Params as a comma delimeted list as usual.

class ObjectContainer {
var $Object;
function ObjectContainer ($Class,$Params="") {
if(!class_exists($Class)include_once($Class.".php"); //This assumes that the class is in a file of the same name
if($Params)
$this->Object= eval (return new $Class($Params));
else // We don't need to waste an eval statement
$this->Object=new $Class;
}
}

Although this example doesn't actually do anything, it shows two things. It helps us see that we should always seperate our classes into seperate files if we don't want all of them loaded into memory at once and wish to dynamically load them as needed.

It also shows us that we can dynamically create new objects from a generalized variable which contains the classname and optionally a parameter list.

I hope this helps a little bit!

PS. If anyone knows how to implement data hiding in PHP I would be indebted to them

[dannys]

Yes.

<?php

class myClass
{
	function myFunction()
	{
	}

function myFunction2()
{
}
}

class myOtherClass extends myClass
{
	function myOtherFunction()
	{
	}
}
?>

$class = new myOtherClass();

// $class will have access to all 3 functions as if they are 1 class.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/keyword.extends.php

[wizhippo]

Thanks but not quite what I'm looking for but I do like the load as you go...

I know about inheritance....I kind of want inhertance on the fly.

What I want to do it have a class that gets all of it's functionality from drop in modules.

so say my main class was

kernelClass

when i create a new instance of kernel class it includes all the modules in a directory called modules. Each module or class then be comes an extesnion or member so you can access it like
$myKernel = new kernelClass();
$myKernel->someModule->doSomething();

also want to do a $listmodules function

[dannys]

Ah, read your question all wrong!

I think something along these lines should do nicely

<?php

class myClass
{
	function myClass()
	{
	}

function loadClass($class)
{
	require_once("$class.class.php");
	$this->$class = new $class();
}
}

$myclass = new myClass();

$myclass->loadClass('myOtherClass');
$myclass->myOtherClass->something('Fooo');

// This would be myOtherClass.class.php
class myOtherClass
{
	function myOtherClass()
	{
		echo "Hello";
	}

function something($foo)
{
	echo $foo;
}
}

[wizhippo]

That's perfect...I owe you a bear!

[dannys]

Originally posted by wizhippo
That's perfect...I owe you a bear!

Nah, not really into bears - I'll take a beer though 🙂

[wizhippo]

That's Canadian spelling...lol
Damn spell check.