Re: "Bless"ing an object

Hi Wouter, The only disadvantage to assigning to $this is that it may not be supported in PHP 5 - php-internals discussion has described it as a bad idea. I would get beta 2 and test it out, see what happens. Incidentally, you don't need to unset new, and I would use $this =& $New; Regards, Greg Wouter van Vliet wrote:

Greg Beaver wrote:

Wouter, you could try this adding this method to each object you need blessings from: function &bless($classname) {

    if ($classname == get_class($this)) {
        return $this;
    }
    $vars = get_object_vars($this);
    $ret = new $classname;
    return $ret->loadValues($vars);

} function &loadValues($vals) {

    foreach ($vals as $name => $val) {
        $this->$name = $val;
    }
    return $this;

} In the Load() method, you should determine what class you need, and call $ret = &$this->bless('classname'), and then return $ret. Then, instead of doing $Thing->Load(); do $Thing = &$Thing->Load(); and have Load() return an object instance (either $this or the newly blessed object). This will maintain encapsulation and achieve the results you're looking for. Regards, Greg

Thanks Greg .. this comes pretty close to what I had done myself as a workaround. Only thing that's different is that in my bless implementation I don't return the blessed value, but overwrite the $this var. Which works. What advantage do you think I would get from your appraoch? [snip The Way I Bless {example from own memory, cannot reach the actual code at this time} ] function Bless($ClassName) { // return false if class doesn't exist if (!class_exists($ClassName)) return false; $New = new $ClassName(); foreach($this as $Key => $Value) $New[$Key] = $Value; $this = $New; unset $New); } [/snip The Way I Bless] Hmm .. maybe I'm thinking 'out of te box' here, but can I manually add this functionality to stdClass, so that they are available in each and ever object I create?