Polymorphic User Account Classes

[fry2010]

I have been reading a lot on polymophism and understand the basics, however when it comes to implementation on something as diverse as different user account types, I struggle to make sense on how best to achieve it. So wondered if someone could give me some pointers as to achieve it:

 

My database tables:

 

user_account (

id mediumint(7)...

firstName varchar(120)...

lastName varchar(120)...

accountTypeId tinyint(1)...

etc...

)

 

account_type_1_profile (

userId mediumint(7)...

getEmails tinyint(1)...

aboutMe...

showDemo...

)

 

account_type_2_profile (

userId mediumint(7)...

differentProfileSetting1 tinyint(1)...

differentProfileSetting2 tinyint(2)...

)

 

As you can see I have a single table for all user account types, but different profile tables. I felt this was best as different accounts will have different profile information. Also I will be having user groups into the mix, so again create another table for group profile settings and a user to group table.

 

Now when creating accounts I have to create a main account, and also a profile for the user depending on the type of user.

 

My current system is:

 

class userClass()

class userAccountClass() - create and edit the account table

class userProfileClass() - create and edit the user profile

 

Within userAccountClass() I have a method called createAccount() - which creates any type of account.

within userProfileClass() I have a method called createProfile() - which is where my issues start to arrive. How can I build it to be polymorphic given that there are a variety of different account profile types?

 

How do I avoid using a big switch statement or multiple methods to achieve same result?

 

Suggestions welcome..

 

[fry2010]

Just in case anyone wondered, I eventually got a fairly good polymorphic design setup (at least I think so):

 

Created a base class called 'profileObject'. This had a static method called 'getProfileObject(userObject $userObject)'.

 

As you can see this accepted an object of type userObject. This method auto-loaded the required sub-class.

For example if the userObject account type was an affiliate, then it would load the sub-class called 'affiliateProfileObject()'.

 

The sub-class extended an abstract class called 'Profile'. This obviously set out the required methods and properties.

 

Now anytime I want to get profile of a user object I simply call:

 

$userProfileObject = profileObject::getProfileObject($userObject);

 

Then if I need to access a property of that users profile I can simply use

 

$userProfileObject->avatar;

 

Hope this helps someone else. Of course if anyone wants to make suggestions on how this could be improved etc I would be interested to hear it. cheers.