PHP7 Constructor class name

Question

I have a Laravel 4.2 application which works with PHP5 without any problems. Since I installed a new vagrant box running PHP7 an error appears as soon as I run a model where

Answer 1

As I understand this, in PHP4 my code was buggy, but not in PHP7, right?

Not quite. PHP4-style constructors still work on PHP7, they are just been deprecated and they will trigger a Deprecated warning.

What you can do is define a __construct method, even an empty one, so that the php4-constructor method won't be called on a newly-created instance of the class.

class foo
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        // Constructor's functionality here, if you have any.
    }

    public function foo()
    {
        // PHP4-style constructor.
        // This will NOT be invoked, unless a sub-class that extends `foo` calls it.
        // In that case, call the new-style constructor to keep compatibility.
        self::__construct();
    }
}

new foo();

It worked with older PHP versions simply because constructors don't get return value. Every time you created a Participant instance, you implicitly call the participant method, that's all.

Answer 2

PHP 4 style constructors (methods that have the same name as the class they are defined in) are deprecated, and will be removed in the future. PHP 7 will emit E_DEPRECATED if a PHP 4 constructor is the only constructor defined within a class. Classes that implement a __construct() method are unaffected.

<?php
    class foo {
        function foo() {
            echo 'I am the constructor';
         }
     }
?>

You can keep your old constructor but you need to add a new construct like that:

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\SoftDeletingTrait;

class Participant extends \Eloquent
{

    use SoftDeletingTrait;

    [...]

    public function __construct()
    {
        return $this->morphTo();
    }

    public function participant()
    {
        return $this->morphTo();
    }

    [...]    

}