Help request: OOP Registry Pattern with nodes

bTr33

Hi all

first a little history. I am in the process of creating an application that basically consists of some sort of portal and lots of sub applications each with distinct individual functionality. From a design point of view these sub applications should be like plugins, somewhat like the individual applications in the Horde framework.

There will be quite some parameters (settings, config items, ...) common to all applications and naturally, some specific to the individual sub apps. I did quite some reading on this, especially since I am pretty new to the whole development thing. This brought me to the idea that a singleton registry pattern may be the right thing to implement, which is what I tried.

While it works great, it currently only allows me to store data in the form of $key => $value in the registry. Anything beyond that (i.e. in the way multidimensional arrays work) I have no idea how to achieve. What I would like to have is something you may call nodes, like this:

$application => $category => $value

For example: applicationA => pathDefinitions => pathToLogFile => /dev/null

So, any input, suggestion and such is greatly appreciated! Please also let me know if I would better use some completely different approach!

Thanks a lot.

Weedpacket

Perhaps you want a Composite, where a value may be (rather, contain) an explicit value, or it may itself be a collection of name/value pairs.

If I recall, The way .NET does its config files is to have an XML file that contains the settings; this is loaded as a DOM object. Then the configuration API is written in terms of querying the DOM, hiding it from view.

bTr33

Great! Since I am new to oop I didn't know about the composite pattern. Your input pointed me in the right direction and I found these two nice articles that pretty much describe exactly what I like to achieve:

http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/7
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/os-xmldomphp/?ca=dgr-lnxw06XML-PHP

Hopefully, this will be of use to others too!

Thanx again!