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PHP catching all function calls
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Loading ...Recently I came accross something really fancy that was introduced in PHP 5. It is appearantly possible for any class to catch all functions that are called on a class. So one function would catch $obj->callOne() as well as $obj->callTwo().
So why is this a nice feature to have, well because I am a very lazy progammer and this feature allows me to magically generate getters and setters. To do this I have the following setting for each class:
- The constructor method __construct initializes an array containing the names of all variables that we want to store. We also create a second array to save the values in for the variables.
- We implement the __call function to catch all functions being called on the object, which is currently still undocumented by PHP.net
So a basic class would look something similar to this:
class MyObject {
private $my_vars = array();
private $allowed_vars;
function __construct() {
$this->allowed_vars = array('var1', 'var2', 'var3');
}
function __calls($function_name, $arguments) {
$_variablename = substr($function_name, 3);
if (array_search($_variablename, $this->allowed_vars) !== FALSE) {
if (stripos($function_name, 'get') == 0 && stripos($function_name, 'get') !== FALSE) {
return $this->my_vars[$_variablename];
} else if (stripos($function_name, 'set') == 0 && stripos($function_name, 'set') !== FALSE) {
$this->my_vars[$_variablename] = $arguments[0];
}
}
else throw new Exception('Unkown function called on '. __CLASS__);
}
}
Which does exactly that which I described above. Mind you it’s just a very basic example but it shows the power of a catch all function.
A fresh start
As you may have noticed by the lack of me posting new articles in the past couple of months I have been really busy on a lot of projects. This has caused me to focus on other things then blogging on Narnio (unfortunattely 
).
I will attempt to start posting somewhat more regularly from now on again, as I’ve sorta managed to get some stuff out of the way. One of them is my work on a complete overhaul of a part of the platform that the Zylom site is running on. Well enough of that!
Ok so what have I been up to that caused little posts. One of my new projects was a complete change of the corporate website I have been maintaining. It’s not live yet, but great things are comming for this website. Which also gets me into the next phase of my career, as I am now looking into starting my own company, and it is really a scary thought 8-O.
I will soon start writing some more posts on developing website platforms in both PHP and Java, as I’ve been learning a lot recently for each one of these two languages.
