ok... im not at home or i would test this myself. im at work (meant to be working), just running through some theories.

anyway, say i have a class. myclass, and in the class, i want a method that will serilise an instance of itself and then store that serilised object in the db. could i do it like this?

public function savestate() {
  $state = serialize($this);
  // save state to db.
}

or would i need to pass the instance in through an argument?

like isaid, im at work so cant test it. anyone know?

    don't ignore the functionality availability of __sleep()

      A common approach to object persistence is ORM. There are some PHP packages out there such as Propel which is quite highly thought of. In essence you really have a layer between your domain and database layer which knows how to turn the properties of an object into an SQL statement, and vice versa.

      class DomainObject
{
  private $a, $b, $c;
  public function setA( $value ) {}
}
class DomainObjectMapper
{
  private $dblayer;
  public function __construct( $dblayer )
  {
    $this->dblayer = $dblayer;
  }
  public function load( $id )
  {
    $data = $this->dblayer->query( /* SQL statement */ );
    return new DomainObject( $data );
  }
  public function save( $object )
  {
    return $this->dblayer->query( /* SQL statement */ );
  }
}
class MySqlDatabase
{
  function query( $sql ) {}
}

$mapper = new DomainObjectMapper( new MySqlDatabase() );
$object = $mapper->load( 1 );
$object->setA( "new value" );
$mapper->save( $object );

        thanks shrike, that gives me a much better idea about how i should go about this.

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