class strategy

[c0deur63]

Hello,

 

I'm starting using class and have a question for you guys : 

 

Let's consider a class "customer". I want to code a search tool. Where should I put my search function ? Within the customer class ? In another "search" class ? Other solution ?

 

Thanks for help !

[ginerjm]

What does the customer class represent?  To me it would be something that manages the data about a customer - name, address, id - things like that.  You want a search function.  Is the search always on the same argument or is it a more general search ?  You might have a method in your class that always allows you to retrieve a specific customer given his 'key' field.  And you might have another method that searches on a more general sense that may use an associative array argument that you can then use to build a search query.  Yes - these two methods would be part your class.

[c0deur63]

thx for the prompt answer.

 

In fact I'm planning to retreive basic info (name, adresse etc.) within the construct method. Is that sounds good  ?

Then if I've well understand your advice I should add a "search_customers($searchterms)" method that would return an array of the matching customer for example ?

[ginerjm]

No.

 

I wouldn't build a search in the construct.  The construct should just create the object then you would use other methods to retrieve data or to add/insert data.  How could you do a search for a customer in the construct if you are creating that customer??  You could do a construct in the search method but not the reverse.

 

As for the alternate search method - the array would be an array of items to be used in the search - say 'city' and 'last name' - to build the query's where clause.  The results of this query would be either the resource that was returned or an array of customer objects.  Personally I think returning the query results would be better and then you let the caller handle it as it wishes.

[c0deur63]

thanks !