Bug #63463 [Nab]: ReflectionProperty::setValue and ::getValue trigger magic methods
Edit report at https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=63463&edit=1
ID: 63463
User updated by: ocramius at gmail dot com
Reported by: ocramius at gmail dot com
Summary: ReflectionProperty::setValue and ::getValue trigger
magic methods
Status: Not a bug
Type: Bug
Package: Reflection related
Operating System: Irrelevant
PHP Version: 5.4.8
Block user comment: N
Private report: N
New Comment:
Isn't reflection able to handle properties in a different way from how userland code acts? I
wouldn't consider Reflection at the same level of other code, or at least I'm not aware of
any way of achieving the same functionality without having access to internal APIs.
I'm not denying the fact that this is probably a design issue and that it would require major
refactoring to workaround it, but the fact that such effort is needed doesn't mean that this is
not a bug.
Want to mark it as improvement instead? Or as a documentation issue and therefore language
limitation (with relative improvement issue)?
Previous Comments:
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[2012-12-18 21:15:18] stas@php.net
I am sorry, but I think your opinion is incorrect. Reflection works the same way and
uses the same engine methods as other ways of accessing properties. Making
Reflection work differently from the rest of the object model would require special
exceptions in all object engine for Reflection and seems to make little sense to me
in general. Reflection is just another way of doing the same thing as regular
property access. I am sorry that your code does not work as you wanted it to, and
you are welcome to propose ways to improve it, including participating in
getters/setters discussion ongoing, but I do not think in this particular case
reflection is doing something wrong. In any case, it is not a bug as the code is
doing exactly as the intent of the code was for it to do.
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[2012-12-10 02:04:46] ocramius at gmail dot com
@stas let me put it into a more "practical" use case I currently have:
I use reflection to populate instances of proxy objects that have "lazy" marked properties
unset at instantiation time. This is good to achieve lazy loading of public properties, but any r/w
access to the property itself via reflection triggers __get or __set.
This makes it impossible to use reflection to populate the property. I worked around it by disabling
__get in particular situations (see https://github.com/Ocramius/common/blob/DCOM-96/lib/Doctrine/Common/Reflection/RuntimePublicReflectionProperty.php),
but at a terrible cost in performance terms and broken behaviour in rare cases.
Back to the issue itself:
I consider Reflection as my last resource to access and modify status of objects without affecting
anything else within my environment. Having reflection trigger any logic during an assignment is an
unwanted and dangerous behaviour in my opinion.
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[2012-12-10 01:51:32] stas@php.net
I'm not sure why you think this is what should be happening. When you unset
properties, they are no longer set. And when you access unset properties, magic
methods kick in. So where's the problem here?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[2012-11-08 06:22:43] ocramius at gmail dot com
I've added the failing test case as a PR at https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/230
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[2012-11-08 06:15:03] ocramius at gmail dot com
Description:
------------
When unset properties are requested, ReflectionProperty::setValue and ReflectionProperty::getValue
trigger __get and __set magic methods.
Test script:
---------------
https://gist.github.com/4037155
Expected result:
----------------
The test script should report NULL for each of the requested values, and never call __set nor __get
Actual result:
--------------
__set and __get are called when ReflectionProperty tries to read or write to the requested
properties.
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