__construct not used correctly?

[MasterACE14]

Good day,

 

I've written a basic class to simply get the latest news from a MySQL table, and through the use of public methods, each column's data can be displayed. However the $row[] array is coming up empty. I suspect I'm not using the constructor properly.

<?php

class News {

   function __construct() {
        $row = $this->getNews("SELECT * FROM `ca_news` ORDER BY `posttime` DESC"); // this isn't right?
    }

    private function getNews($sql) {
        global $database;
        $q = $database->query($sql);
        $row = $database->fetch_array($q);
        return $row;
    }

    public function newsDate($format) {
        global $row;
        return date($format, strtotime($row['posttime']));
    }

    public function newsAuthor() {
        global $row;
        return $row['author'];
    }

    public function newsText() {
        global $validate;
        global $row;
        return $validate->cleanInput( "alphanum", $row['text'] );
    }

}

?>

<?php
    $news = new News;
?>
                                <div style="">
                                    <center>
                                              <table class="art-article" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="width: 80%; text-align: center;">
                                              <th>News</th>
                                              <tbody>
                                                <tr>
                                                  <th><?php echo $news->newsAuthor(); ?></th>
                                                  <th><?php echo $news->newsDate("F j, Y"); ?></th>
                                                </tr>
                                                <tr>
                                                  <td colspan="2"><?php echo $news->newsText(); ?></td>
                                                </tr>
                                              </tbody></table>
                                    </center>
                                </div>

 

appreciate the help, thanks

 

[trq]

I suspect I'm not using the constructor properly

 

Your not using the entire concept of a class properly.

 

Don't use globals within class methods to pass data around. Your missing the entire point of classes.

 

You should be using private properties to store data belonging to a class. This data is the accessible to all methods within said class.

[MasterACE14]

Don't use globals within class methods to pass data around. Your missing the entire point of classes.

 

You should be using private properties to store data belonging to a class. This data is the accessible to all methods within said class.

 

I have the following now and it's working, is this the general idea?

class News {

    private $row;

   function __construct() {
        $this->row = $this->getNews("SELECT * FROM `ca_news` ORDER BY `posttime` DESC");
    }

    private function getNews($sql) {
        global $database;
        $q = $database->query($sql);
        $row = $database->fetch_array($q);
        return $row;
    }

    public function newsDate($format) {
        return date($format, strtotime($this->row['posttime']));
    }

    public function newsAuthor() {
        return $this->row['author'];
    }

    public function newsText() {
        global $validate;
        return $validate->cleanInput( "alphanum", $this->row['text'] );
    }

}

[trq]

Its better but $database and $validate appear from nowhere. this completely breaks the entire idea of encapsulation.