Re: runtime access to static variable

> this does beg the question why don't you know the classname at runtime.. > seems to be a slight design flaw and may make sense for you to post the > full problem (you must have chosen to implement this for a reason..) The full problem is: I started off with a "DeployTask" for deploying a new instance of my web project to DreamHost: http://cgi.sfu.ca/~jdbates/tmp/php/200812170/DeployTask.class.phps (It is a "task" in the symfony framework, but basically the DeployTask::execute() method gets called) The task takes about thirty minutes to run, so I broke it up into steps. After each step, it updates a database row so that a user who started the task through a web interface can monitor its progress. Great so far. Now I decided to create an "UpdateTask" for updating deployed instances to the latest version of my code: http://cgi.sfu.ca/~jdbates/tmp/php/200812170/UpdateTask.class.phps Of course it also takes a long time to run, so my first iteration just extends the DeployTask and defines different steps. UpdateTask inherits DeployTask::execute(), which drives the steps and updates the database. Unfortunately, in the inherited DeployTask::execute(), "self::$STEPS" does not refer to UpdateTask::$STEPS, it refers to DeployTask::$STEPS : ( I gather with "late static bindings" in PHP 5.3, "static::$STEPS" does what I want? Anyway, DeployTask::execute() is not static, so I know whether $this is an instance of DeployTask of UpdateTask: "get_class($this)" returns it. Which brought me to my contrived example: ket% cat test.php <?php class Test { public static $STEPS = array( 'foo', 'bar'); } $className = 'Test'; var_dump($className::$STEPS); ket% Except that in real life, "$className = get_class($this)" > Check this out: > http://us2.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.static.php > > It actually won't work until 5.3.0 when they add late static binding. I ran my contrived example with PHP 5.3alpha3, and it worked! "$className::$STEPS" is not a parse error in 5.3, which is cool : ) Except that in 5.3, I will probably just use "static::$STEPS" anyway : P In the meantime, I will probably use reflection as suggested: // HACK: Use "static::$STEPS" in PHP 5.3: // http://php.net/oop5.late-static-bindings $class = new ReflectionClass($this); $steps = $class->getStaticPropertyValue('STEPS');