OO Programming - how to?

[nightowl]

I have a class company, a class employee. Of course, one company employs more than one employee. Both classes store their data in a databse (table 'companies' and table 'employees').

Should I define $company->getAllEmployees() , or should I define another class 'employees' and there define a method 'fetchByCompany()'. Both could return an array with objects 'employee', while the latter solution would allow late-retrieval of the data in the database (only when going through the employees, we create the object employee).

any suggestions?

[ahundiak]

I'll often create ListOf classes such as Employees with different methods for querying and perhaps sorting/filtering. And once you have such a class it then becomes trivial to implement a Company::getAllEmployees method. So my suggestion is to do both.

[nightowl]

that is an interesting approach which I didn't think of yet. Thx for the input!

[nightowl]

those listOff classes: do you define a method "getByCompany($companyname)", specifying the company, or would you rather make it more general like getWithRestriction ($fieldname, $value) ?