Best practice PHP Magic Methods set and get

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Possible Duplicate    Are Magic Methods Best practice in PHP        These are simple examples  but imagine you have more properties than two in your class   What would be best practice   a  Using   get and   set  class MyClass       private  firstField      private  secondField       public function   get  property                if  property exists  this   property                     return  this- gt  property                           public function   set  property   value            if  property exists  this   property                  this- gt  property    value                      myClass   new MyClass      myClass- gt firstField    This is a foo line    myClass- gt secondField    This is a bar line    echo  myClass- gt firstField  echo  myClass- gt secondField      Output      This is a foo line     This is a bar line       b  Using traditional setters and getters  class MyClass        private  firstField      private  secondField       public function getFirstField             return  this- gt firstField             public function setFirstField  firstField             this- gt firstField    firstField             public function getSecondField             return  this- gt secondField             public function setSecondField  secondField             this- gt secondField    secondField             myClass   new MyClass      myClass- gt setFirstField  This is a foo line     myClass- gt setSecondField  This is a bar line     echo  myClass- gt getFirstField    echo  myClass- gt getSecondField        Output      This is a foo line     This is a bar line       In this article  http   blog webspecies co uk 2011-05-23 the-new-era-of-php-frameworks html  The author claims that using magic methods is not a good idea       First of all  back then it was very popular to use PHP   s magic functions    get    call etc    There is nothing wrong with them from a first look  but they are actually really dangerous  They make APIs unclear  auto-completion impossible and most importantly they are slow  The use case for them was to hack PHP to do things which it didn   t want to  And it worked  But made bad things happen    But I would like to hear more opinions about this

User · Answer

You should use stdClass if you want magic members  if you write a class - define what it contains

User · Answer

I have been exactly in your case in the past  And I went for magic methods   This was a mistake  the last part of your question says it all     this is slower  than getters setters  there is no auto-completion  and this is a major problem actually   and type management by the IDE for refactoring and code-browsing  under Zend Studio PhpStorm this can be handled with the  property phpdoc annotation but that requires to maintain them  quite a pain  the documentation  phpdoc  doesn t match how your code is supposed to be used  and looking at your class doesn t bring much answers as well  This is confusing  added after edit  having getters for properties is more consistent with  real  methods where getXXX   is not only returning a private property but doing real logic  You have the same naming  For example you have  user- gt getName    returns private property  and  user- gt getToken  key   computed   The day your getter gets more than a getter and needs to do some logic  everything is still consistent    Finally  and this is the biggest problem IMO   this is magic  And magic is very very bad  because you have to know how the magic works to use it properly  That s a problem I ve met in a team  everybody has to understand the magic  not just you   Getters and setters are a pain to write  I hate them  but they are worth it

User · Answer

I vote for a third solution  I use this in my projects and Symfony uses something like this too   public function   call  val   x        if substr  val  0  3      get              varname   strtolower substr  val  3              else           throw new Exception  Bad method    500             if property exists  Yourclass    varname             return  this- gt  varname        else           throw new Exception  Property does not exist     varname  500             This way you have automated getters  you can write setters too   and you only have to write new methods if there is a special case for a member variable

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I am now returning to setters and getters but I am also putting the getters and setters in the magic methos   get and   set  This way I have a default behavior when I do this      class- var    This will just call the getter I have set in the   get  Normally I will just use the getter directly but there are still some instances where this is just simpler

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I do a mix of edem s answer and your second code  This way  I have the benefits of common getter setters  code completion in your IDE   ease of coding if I want  exceptions due to inexistent properties  great for discovering typos   foo- gt naem instead of  foo- gt name   read only properties and compound properties   class Foo       private   bar      private   baz       public function getBar                 return  this- gt  bar             public function setBar  value                 this- gt  bar    value             public function getBaz                 return  this- gt  baz             public function getBarBaz                 return  this- gt  bar          this- gt  baz             public function   get  var                 func    get   var          if  method exists  this   func                         return  this- gt  func              else               throw new InexistentPropertyException  Inexistent property   var                         public function   set  var   value                 func    set   var          if  method exists  this   func                          this- gt  func  value             else               if  method exists  this   get   var                                 throw new ReadOnlyException  property  var is read-only                  else                   throw new InexistentPropertyException  Inexistent property   var

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I use   get  and public properties  as much as possible  because they make code much more readable  Compare   this code unequivocally says what i m doing   echo  user- gt name    this code makes me feel stupid  which i don t enjoy   function getName     return  this- gt  name          echo  user- gt getName      The difference between the two is particularly obvious when you access multiple properties at once   echo       Dear  user- gt firstName  user- gt lastName      Your purchase           product- gt name   product- gt count x  product- gt price     and  echo       Dear      user- gt getFirstName            user- gt getLastName           Your purchase                product- gt getName            product- gt getCount        x      product- gt getPrice            Whether  a- gt b should really do something or just return a value is the responsibility of the callee  For the caller   user- gt name and  user- gt accountBalance should look the same  although the latter may involve complicated calculations  In my data classes i use the following small method    function   get  p            m    get  p         if method exists  this   m   return  this- gt  m          user error  undefined property  p         when someone calls  obj- gt xxx and the class has get xxx defined  this method will be implicitly called  So you can define a getter if you need it  while keeping your interface uniform and transparent  As an additional bonus this provides an elegant way to memorize calculations     function get accountBalance            result    lt    complex stuff    gt           since we cache the result in a public property  the getter will be called only once        this- gt accountBalance    result                   echo  user- gt accountBalance     calculate the value            echo  user- gt accountBalance     use the cached value   Bottom line  php is a dynamic scripting language  use it that way  don t pretend you re doing Java or C

User · Answer

The best practice would be to use traditionnal getters and setters  because of introspection or reflection  There is a way in PHP  exactly like in Java  to obtain the name of a method or of all methods  Such a thing would return    get  in the first case and  getFirstField    getSecondField  in the second  plus setters    More on that  http   php net manual en book reflection php

User · Answer

You only need to use magic if the object is indeed  magical   If you have a classic object with fixed properties then use setters and getters  they work fine   If your object have dynamic properties for example it is part of a database abstraction layer  and its parameters are set at runtime then you indeed need the magic methods for convenience

User · Answer

Second code example is much more proper way to do this because you are taking full control of data which are given to class   There are cases in which the   set and   get are useful but not in this case

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