Getting the name of a child class in the parent class (static context)

Question

I\'m building an ORM library with reuse and simplicity in mind; everything goes fine except that I got stuck by a stupid inheritance limitation. Please consider the code bel

Answer 1

Maybe this isn't actually answering the question, but you could add a parameter to get() specifing the type. then you can call

BaseModel::get('User', 1);

instead of calling User::get(). You could add logic in BaseModel::get() to check whether a get method exists in the subclass and then call that if you want to allow the subclass to override it.

Otherwise the only way I can think of obviously is by adding stuff to each subclass, which is stupid:

class BaseModel {
    public static function get() {
        $args = func_get_args();
        $className = array_shift($args);

        //do stuff
        echo $className;
        print_r($args);
    }
}

class User extends BaseModel {
    public static function get() { 
        $params = func_get_args();
        array_unshift($params, __CLASS__);
        return call_user_func_array( array(get_parent_class(__CLASS__), 'get'), $params); 
    }
}


User::get(1);

This would probably break if you then subclassed User, but I suppose you could replace get_parent_class(__CLASS__) with 'BaseModel' in that case

Answer 2

In case you don't want to use get_called_class() you can use other tricks of late static binding (PHP 5.3+). But the downside in this case you need to have getClass() method in every model. Which is not a big deal IMO.

<?php

class Base 
{
    public static function find($id)
    {
        $table = static::$_table;
        $class = static::getClass();
        // $data = find_row_data_somehow($table, $id);
        $data = array('table' => $table, 'id' => $id);
        return new $class($data);
    }

    public function __construct($data)
    {
        echo get_class($this) . ': ' . print_r($data, true) . PHP_EOL;
    }
}

class User extends Base
{
    protected static $_table = 'users';

    public static function getClass()
    {
        return __CLASS__;
    }
}

class Image extends Base
{
    protected static $_table = 'images';

    public static function getClass()
    {
        return __CLASS__;
    }
}

$user = User::find(1); // User: Array ([table] => users [id] => 1)  
$image = Image::find(5); // Image: Array ([table] => images [id] => 5)

Answer 3

It appears you might be trying to use a singleton pattern as a factory pattern. I would recommend evaluating your design decisions. If a singleton really is appropriate, I would also recommend only using static methods where inheritance is not desired.

class BaseModel
{

    public function get () {
        echo get_class($this);

    }

    public static function instance () {
        static $Instance;
        if ($Instance === null) {
            $Instance = new self;

        }
        return $Instance;
    }
}

class User
extends BaseModel
{
    public static function instance () {
        static $Instance;
        if ($Instance === null) {
            $Instance = new self;

        }
        return $Instance;
    }
}

class SpecialUser
extends User
{
    public static function instance () {
        static $Instance;
        if ($Instance === null) {
            $Instance = new self;

        }
        return $Instance;
    }
}


BaseModel::instance()->get();   // value: BaseModel
User::instance()->get();        // value: User
SpecialUser::instance()->get(); // value: SpecialUser