Zend Framework and external classes

[Gromski]

I've decided to try out the Zend Framework on my latest little project. Whilst it's not entirely up to scratch at the moment I figured it's probably one of the few frameworks out there with any sort of guarantee of longevity.

My problem comes about in one of my controllers. I've loaded a class (Option) using the Zend::loadFile() function within one of my actions. I then create a series of Option objects with the intention of passing them to another function for processing.

Creating them is no problem at all - I simply call the Option constructor and pass in the correct parameters. The trouble is that the created object does not appear to be an Option object - if I do a gettype() on it it simply returns 'object'.

function productAction()
{
    Zend::loadFile('Option.php', '../lib/ForwardOrder/');
        ....
    $option = new Option($currentOpt, $choices);
        ....
}

Should I be using a different handler to include the Option class within the controller? Or should I be creating an Option object and adding it to the registry in my index.php? Or something else entirely?

I'm at a bit of a cross roads here and don't really want to have to start completely recoding things....

[ahundiak]

The reason gettype() returns 'object' is that $option is indeed an object.
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.gettype.php
Use get_class to get the class name.
Or better yet, try Zend::dump($option);

[Gromski]

Ok so it's definitely an Option even when passed to another function.

What I don't understand is that I don't appear to have access to the internal functions within that class, i.e. $option.getName() returns "Fatal error: Call to undefined function getName() in...."

[Weedpacket]

Gromski wrote:

i.e. $option.getName() returns "Fatal error: Call to undefined function getName() in...."

That's because the syntax for calling methods in PHP is $option->getName() . is the string concatenation operator.

[Gromski]

Doh!

That'll teach me for hacking around in other languages...

Thx Weedpacket

[Weedpacket]

Hey; the number of times I tripped myself up switching back and forth between C# and PHP ....

[Gromski]

Out of curiosity is that the best way to reference my own classes (using the Zend::loadFIle())?

They're all in teh lib dir but the include path doesn't seem to pick them up....