Re: OOP style question

Thanks Scott, That's kind of what I thought -- that there's no cut-and-dried answer to the question I asked. I'm actually amazed that it came out coherently enough for someone to understand it and answer! Your solution is a good one. On the one hand this is less modular, since it tests for certain conditions that have to exist (i.e., the POSTed variables) and thus requires a completely different method for completely different conditions, but on the other hand, it does nicely keep all of the code in the class so that the script doesn't get bogged down with many method calls. I do one call to dothis(), which does all my work, and then I'm done. That's what I'll go with, thank you. Erik On Thursday, June 6, 2002, at 05:09 PM, Scott Hurring wrote:

It depends highly on what you're doing and how you're doing it :) If somethign needs to be done *always*, just throw it into the Object so that the user won't have to call it explicitly, however if you want to provide fine-grained control over how/when/why things are cleaned-up, you might want to keep it "public" and let the user call it explicitly. For example, if clean-up is automatic, and only once-per-session, this might be somewhat along the lines of what i think you're asking for::: function dothis($form) { // ..... do whatever to POSTED variables $this->cleanup($form); } function cleanup($form) { // Only run once per instance if ($this->cleanup_called) return 1; $this->cleanup_called = 1; // ... do cleanup } --- Scott Hurring Systems Programmer EAC Corporation ScottH@eac.com Voice: 201-462-2149 Fax: 201-288-1515

-----Original Message----- From: Erik Price [mailto:pricee@hhbrown.com] Sent: Thursday, June 06, 2002 4:58 PM To: php-general@lists.php.net Subject: [PHP] OOP style question I'm trying to solve my earlier-posted dilemma of a class attribute (array) that is "remembering" elements that should have been unset(). The good news is that, according to some testing I've been doing (I have separated the relevant code and am directly testing it), it looks like PHP is behaving as expected -- I really hope that it's just an error on my part, so that I can fix it. But out of this exercise I have begun to wonder something. If someone who is better-schooled than I in object oriented programming style could respond I would be very grateful. I have a method in my class that essentially unsets an array element. The frequency with which this method is called varies depending on the circumstances, so i can't "hard-code" the solution to this problem. But after the method is done being called (however many times it need be called), a second method needs to be called. Think of this second one as a "clean up" method, that needs to be called anytime the first method is called, but ONLY ONCE per script instance, no matter how many times the first method was called. This means that I can't just call method #2 every time I call method #1. Now, originally I was doing all of this method calling from the script itself. For each variable POSTed by the user, I call the first method. But now that I have a second "clean-up" method that needs to be called, how should I go about it? Should I have one "master" method in the class that is called from the script, and itself does all the work? This keeps all of the work in the class, and out of the calling script. OR... Should I keep the class free of code that only executes according to POST variables from the user, and keep this kind of thing in the calling script. That way, the object's class is more flexible, and can be used in more contexts. Again, this is really a question of style -- I can get it to work either way. I'm just wondering if a class should be written to handle ALL CODE related to its class, and keep most of the work in "private" methods (not really enforced in PHP but whatever), or whether the class should be written so that it has a lot of public methods that can be called from the script, which means that the class is more flexible in the long run? A question of encapsulation vs modularity, it would seem. Your thoughts are gratefully accepted. Erik

---- Erik Price Web Developer Temp Media Lab, H.H. Brown pricee@hhbrown.com

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