Making PHP Classes Play Nicely With Each Other (OOP Pattern Question)

centenial

Hi all,

I have a PHP OOP design question. I've done some searching in google, but wasn't able to turn up anything concrete. I'm hoping some experts can point me to the most elegant solution. 🙂

I have a set of classes. All of my classes "extend" an abstract class called Base. (This class reads a config file, has a basic set of common methods, and sets up needed parameters)

Most of my classes need a class called Mysql to perform database operations.

Is the best way to access the Mysql class to pass it in the __constructor in each of my child classes, or to instantiate it in my Base class, and assign it to a public property? Or perhaps there is a better way altogether?

I'm really looking for the best way to do this, so thanks in advance for your advice!

NogDog

I've seen arguments for most of the solutions, none of which have convinced me there's an absolute best practice for all circumstances.

Generally (at least for now) I favor passing it as a constructor argument as it keeps the interfaces more transparent and avoids having separate objects each opening up their own database connections while avoiding the global variable-like aspects of using a singleton class. But I'm open to being convinced otherwise if anyone has a good argument for doing so.

daarius

look at the phpobject.com

its "database" package follows the Java's JDBC structure. i.e. was created for Java developers to make a switch to PHP (painlessly!).

it follows complex OO patterns... but nice to look into.

Weedpacket

Generally (of course, for the same reasons) I agree with NogDog: your child classes that use the have a database connection, they're not database connections themselves. In fact, I'm wondering if this isn't what is more appropriate for most of your Base class (your child classes aren't themselves types of Bases, they're all sorts of different things that have a common Base environment - which itself sounds like it's more likely to be a whole bunch of things that have been mashed together: it smells like your class hierarchy is fighting with the relationships that exist between your classes and the latter are constantly having to work around the hierarchy (via "Base") to get anything done.