EricIsGood Posted November 9, 2008 Share Posted November 9, 2008 I've been googling for hours, and I can't seem to find any 'best practice' information on this. In my example, I have a Notice object, and a Notices object. Notices is simply a collection of Notice objects. In the future I may want to have more control over adding / removing notices from the collection, but for now the raw access is fine. My example code is bellow. My questions are: 1. is this the best way to go about a collection of objects? 2. if I want more control over Notices (plural) such as restricting the type of Notice (singular) that can be added to the collection, could I do that without refactoring code outside the class? 3. would it be better design to only allow the Notices class to access the Notice class? Thanks for your help. -Eric $notices = new Notices(); if (trim($userName) == "") { $notice = new Notice('userName','Please choose a username.'); $this->notices->notice[0] = $notice; } if (trim($userName) == "Webmaster") { $notice = new Notice('userName','Reserved Name.'); $this->notices->notice[1] = $notice; } echo $this->notices->notice[0]->text; echo $this->notices->notice[1]->text; class Notices { public $notice = array(); } class Notice { public $type; public $text; public function __construct($type, $text) { $this->type = $type; $this->text = $text; } } Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/131997-best-way-to-handle-a-collection-of-objects/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stooney Posted November 10, 2008 Share Posted November 10, 2008 Try something along the lines of this: <?php class Notices{ private $notice=array(); public function get($key){ //Accepts an array of keys if(is_array($key)){ $return=array(); foreach($key as $notice){ $return[$notice]=$this->notice[$notice]; } return $return; } return $this->notice[$key]; } public function add($key, $object){ if(!array_key_exists($key, $this->notice)){ $this->notice[$key]=$object; return true; } throw new Exception('Key already exists'); } } ?> Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/131997-best-way-to-handle-a-collection-of-objects/#findComment-686499 Share on other sites More sharing options...
EricIsGood Posted November 10, 2008 Author Share Posted November 10, 2008 Chris, Thanks for the reply. This works fine in my current case. For future reference, if I had a very large collection of objects, and wanted to let external code iterate through them, would this be substantially slower than direct access to an array? Thanks, -Eirc Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/131997-best-way-to-handle-a-collection-of-objects/#findComment-686508 Share on other sites More sharing options...
corbin Posted November 10, 2008 Share Posted November 10, 2008 A function call would of course be slower than direct variable [in this case an array, which would be yet slower than a normal {used in this context as int, string, so on} variable] access. Unless you have a huge amount of calls to add() or get() you should be fine. Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/131997-best-way-to-handle-a-collection-of-objects/#findComment-687245 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daniel0 Posted November 11, 2008 Share Posted November 11, 2008 For the record, what chrisdburns posted is called a registry. Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/131997-best-way-to-handle-a-collection-of-objects/#findComment-687556 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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