Re: Question about Classes

Andrew Darby wrote:

Hello, all. I have a sort of theoretical/sort of dumb question about PHP classes, which I haven't really worked with and don't entirely understand the purpose of, so here goes: Say i want to handle the add or update or delete of an item to a MySQL db, and instead of having three functions (function addItem, function updateItem, function deleteItem), it seems I could: a) have one function (modifyItem) with some sort of attribute saying which type it is, and then if/else through to the appropriate type of operation based on this flag, i.e., modifyItem($array_of_data, 'update') chooses the update switch b) have a modifyItem class, with the three possible functions inside c) stick with my three original functions

Using any of these methods, how would you construct a query to actually run? Do you need to pass in the fieldnames and the data? eg: $data = array('newstitle' => $title, 'newscontent' => $data); How about which table to place this data in? It would get complicated I think.. I construct my queries elsewhere then hand it to my db class for processing. It has some basic functions: - Query (runs pg_query/mysql_query) - Fetch (runs pg_fetch_assoc/mysql_fetch_assoc) - Quote (runs pg_escape_string/mysql_escape_string) and so on.

Is b) the sort of thing you might use a class for, or do I misunderstand? If not, what would be some "classic" uses of classes in our php/mysql world?

OOP is good for API's. <shameless plug> http://www.designmagick.com/article/18/PHP/Introduction-to-Object-Oriented-Programming -- Postgresql & php tutorials http://www.designmagick.com/