Anything bad about nesting classes?

[bunner_bob]

I've got a page right now that's built using a class. It's a pretty complicated class and has about 6 main sections, some of which loop. I'm thinking it would make more sense to do some of the looping sections as classes themselves. So essentially I'll be creating new class instances within the class.

For example, I'd have a class called "Page", with methods for the header, formatting of the overall page, main content and footer. Within the class are a couple of lists that generate a number of list items, each with a fair bit of formatting.

Are there any problems (in a general way) doing things this way?

Can I return values from a class the same way I do from a function? I can't return them to a class variable (like $this->variable) because the variable would stay within the class. I basically need to "kick" the returned value out one level so I can use it in the outer, containing "Page" class. The other option is to just echo them, but that doesn't work too well for my situation.

Any advice?

[planetsim]

I dont see much trouble if you define the new class within one, im not sure on the way your class is planned out but you may want to use Extends

[drawmack]

What you explain is not nesting classes.

A nested class would be putting the implementation code for one class inside the implementation of another class. This there is a problem with as the whole point of oo is portability and you've effectivly made the internal classes non-portable.

What you describe is simply making a variable inside class a or type class b, that's not a problem at all. Though what might be a better solution is to use the extends operator and make use of inheritance instead.

[bunner_bob]

Sorry - guess I wasn't clear. I AM talking about nested classes. Here's a better example:

class Bar {
 var $text;
 function BarFunction(){
  $this->text = "blah";
 }
echo $this->text;
}

class Page {
 var $a;
 var $b;

 function Foo () {
  (some code)
 }

 if ($makebar > 0) {
  $bar = new Bar();
  $bar->BarFunction();
 }

}

And so on, with any number of optional "subclasses" like Bar, which would represent the various components of the page that might or might not need to be implemented in any particular instance of Page.

Anyway, I tried it in a basic way (with the output of "Bar" being some echoed text. This works fine, but I couldn't get the output returned as a variable by using the word "return" - this just errored out for me. Maybe I need to return it to a global variable, or something else.

Does this make sense? Any ideas how I can get the output out of the internally nested class?

Thanks
Bob