Re: Using setters/getters with array of objects

Hi,

$u->emails[] = $e;

I would hazard a guess because $u->emails isn't a concrete object (whereas $u->_emails is, but is private.) It's sort of a virtual reference - PHP has no way of knowing that $u->emails actually translates into _emails which is an array, if you see what I mean (it's difficult to explain.)

But that does not work. I've managed to achieve similar result using a different setter in User public function __set($name, $value) {

       $property = '_' . $name;

       switch($name)
       {
           case 'emails':
               array_push($this->$property, $value);
               break;

           default:
              $this->$property = $value;
       }

}

You could also have done: if (is_array($this->$property)) {

    array_push($this->$property, $value);

} else {

    $this->$property = $value;

} which would handle any array property, not just the e-mails property. If this was me, I would probably create a concrete method, called "addEmail" which would do $this->_emails[] = $value, but allow a programmer to call $user->emails to get the e-mails (not set.)