OOP Filemanager

Mobius

I am currently finishing my senior year of highschool, and the last five weeks of school, the seniors are allowed to pursue and independent interest and study it. I decided to learn PHP, and try to use my knowledge of (Java) OOP to write software for php5.

My current project is a filemanager with three classes. A filemanager class, which has directoryobjects, which has fileobjects. I have a few questions about the generally accepted style of coding for usere interaction and the likes. I would love to chat with anyone who would be willing to do so.

My main question right now is: Is there a better way (besides using $_GET) to get actions from a link? I suppose I could POST, but i am not sure how..

Any help or discussion would be much appreciated!🆒

chipgrahpics

It all depends what you are wanting to do.
Can you explain more what it is that you want in further details?

Chipgraphics

Mobius

Basically it comes down to wanting to call a function in filemanger, which will either call a function in the directory object or in the directory object and THEN the file object...

Shrike

In answer to your question, $GET is probably the most appropriate method. Using $POST on a link would require some Javascript, not really ideal.

Since you are using PHP 5 I think you could make extensive use of the DirectoryIterator iterator found in the SPL. The manual is missing the documentation for this at the moment so you will need to hunt around on the internet.

It would also be worth checking out the Code Critique forum where I'm sure alot of people have tackled file managers before, although perhaps not with OOP in mind.

Mobius

Right now I have a driver class that includes the 3 class definitions. I am trying to store the file manager object in the session so it doesnt have to be remade.

session_start();
include_once("config.php");
include_once("filemanager.class.php");
$_SESSION['filemanager'] = new FileManager();
include_once("directory.class.php");
include_once("file.class.php");

For some reason I am getting errors in the File Managers's constructor because the filemanager is included in the driver before the directory is.

PHP Fatal error: Class 'DirectoryObject' not found in C:\www\dev\filemanager.class.php on line 9

Line 9 instantiates a new DirectoryObject.

If i put it the other way around, then Directory complains about no Filemanager... help?!

-tia-

Shrike

If you store objects in a session, you need to include the class definition before starting the session, since PHP needs that when recreating the object from the session file. I'm not sure if this is your problem, but in any case it's good practice to put your includes at the top of the file. Or you might want to take a look at _autoload, a nifty class loader.

I'm not sure that storing the object in a session saves you much since as mentioned above it needs to be recreated in any case. Storing an compsite object with all of the file and directory info in might be worth it, but then you might end up with out of sync data.

Mobius

What would you suggest to keep the file manager object (which as an array of dir objects, which have arrays of files, etc) between pages?

Shrike

I think the real question is do you actually need to keep data between pages? I appreciate that you will need to remember which directories are expanded, so perhaps that is something which needs to persist.

If you really need to store the actual directory structure I think you'd need to implement some sort of caching mechanism that is able to check whether something has changed and rebuild the cache.