PHP OOP: Unique method per argument type?

Question

I\'m writing a little homebrew ORM (academic interest). I\'m trying to adhere to the TDD concept as a training exercise, and as part of that exercise I\'m writing documentat

Answer 1

You could achieve something like method overloading by checking the type of the passed parameter at runtime (PHP does not support this concept known from other languages like ADA, Java, C# or C++ e.g.):

[...]
/**
 * @param  User|array|integer $user
 * @return array
 */
public function getCollection($user) {
    // perhaps a switch-case would be better here
    if ($user instanceof User) {
        // do what has to be done if you passed in a User object
    } else if (is_int($user) {
        // do what has to be done if you passed in a user id
    } else if (is_array($user)) {
        // do what has to be done if you passed in an array of user ids
    }
}
[...]