Thinking OO

[sYFFAN]

Hi, I'm a bit puzzled when trying for the first time to code in php5. Let's say I'm creating a forum. So I created two classes Member and Thread (for now). The thread has
Member $author, $title etc.

Now my question is, do I really need to give all the properties for author in the member object? I'm only interested in the username, not the rest.

I mean something like this

<?php

class Member {

  private $username;
  private $password;
  private $someotherinfo;

  public function setUsername($uname) {
    $this->username = $uname;
  }

  public function getUsername() {
    return $this->username;
  }

}

$memb = new Member;
$memb->setUsername("Kalle");
echo $memb->getUsername();

?>

Is it okay to leave the $password and $someotherinfo uninitialized, or is it considered bad in OOP?

[thorpe]

if your members have passwords, they should be described in your class. surely somewhere in your application you need to know the members password?

[sYFFAN]

Yes, but not in a thread on the forum. The reason I'm asking is because the sql queries gets really big when I need to fill each member object, when I'm only interested in 1 column (username) for just this page.

[Weedpacket]

You could just store the username; what you'll want to provide then is a static method in the Member class that, given the username (as a string), will return the appropriate object for that user.

static function lookupByUsername($username)
{
    // ... Search the database for a member with this $username
   // Return the Member if found, null otherwise
}

Incidentally, have you looked into using get() and set() yet?

public function __get($property)
{
  switch($property)
  {
      case 'Username': return $this->username;
      case 'JoinDate': return $this->joindate; // or whatever.
      //...etc.
  }
}

public function __set($property, $value)
{
  switch($property)
  {
      case 'Username': $this->username = $value; break;
      case 'JoinDate': $this->joindate = $value; break;
      //...etc.
  }
}

And then instead of writing $member->getUsername() you'd write $member->Username (not to be confused with $member->username) and instead of $member->setUsername('wibble') you'd write $member->Username = 'wibble'.