Building an attributes function without late static binding

[dgruetter]

Hi,

I have been trying to improve my PHP programming skills by following the Lynda.com Beyond the basics tutorial and they came to a section where they were building common database methods inside a database class.

 

Since they did not have PHP 5.3 (Where late static bindings is introduced) they had to place code referring to self:: inside of each class that needs this functionality. It seems that not having late static binding was binding self to the database class and not to other classes that call it statically. I will insert some code to explain this better.

 

Long story short, I was really interesting in getting an attributes function working and as I do not have late static bindg either, I cannot figure out how to call it from inside a class to make it function correctly.

 

Here is some code. Below is the attribute class they wrote. Each class declared an array of attributes for each of the classes that want to call this method like

 

protected static $db_fields = array('id', 'email', 'password', 'etc');

 

	
        protected function attributes() { 
        // return an array of attribute names and their values
  $attributes = array();
  foreach(self::$db_fields as $field) {
    if(property_exists($this, $field)) {
      $attributes[$field] = $this->$field;
    }
  }
  return $attributes;
}

 

They planned on moving this code to a DatabaseObject class after they get LSB but until then, have to include it in every class that wants use this.

 

Is there any way to write this as a function, include it in a class, and call the method without late static binding.. or even place this inside a database class and call it from another class without LSB?

 

Forgive me if I am not explaining this correctly, again, I am still learning.

 

My version of PHP is 5.2.6.

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