CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpnamespacesurl-routingcomposer-phpautoload
Mathias Jørgensen
Mathias Jørgensen

Reputation: 64

PHP exclude namespace usage from file

This question is a bit odd and really hard to explain so I'll try my best.

Basically, I've been wondering how to actually use classes inside their own files and then use the namespace for that class elsewhere.

As an example most PHP developers might know, like Laravel does with routes, you have routes.php file that is for routes only, there's no namespace defined at the top e.g: use Acme\Router - However, the class still works and doesn't spit any errors. How is this accomplished?

Example

My index loads in composer autoloader which also loads my application class

<?php

// Used namespace here to actually make it function
use Acme\Application as App;

require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

$app = new App;

$app->launch();

The launch is for things that the application should do once launched, here I am thinking loading in the routes and etc. (I am not sure if this is the proper way to handle this, but it's my best shot.)

The class is like so:

<?php

namespace Acme;

class Application
{
    public function __construct()
    {

    }

    public function launch()
    {
        // Require routes etc.  
    }
}

What I was thinking initially was requiring the files, but I was thinking it would be bad practice to require files within a method. And even so, that would also become a huge list of things it should require.

However whatever I have tried didn't work out, what I am trying to do is avoid having use in my routes.php or etc to avoid a list of things I want to use such as:

use Acme\Database\Handler;

use Acme\Router;

because in the long run, this can become pretty massive.

What am I doing wrong and how should I actually approach this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 879

Answers (2)

Mathias J&#248;rgensen
Mathias J&#248;rgensen

Reputation: 64

So after more research into this I found out what I was trying to achieve was Facades not application structure, as I said it was hard to explain so I'm going to throw the solution to my problem out there.

Basically since this approach comes from using Laravel a lot I asked in the Laracasts forum which gave me exactly what I was looking for, it has a link to a working repository as well.

Thanks for the help regardless!

Solution including repository

Upvotes: 0

Sven
Sven

Reputation: 70893

You probably didn't clearly state your question, so I'm doing a bit of guessing from my encounters with less experienced developers from the past.

I think we can stop discussing "requiring the files", because you should use autoloading to make classes, interfaces or traits available. And it is easy to do so because you are already using Composer. Check.

The remaining point is that you are afraid to add a huge number of "use" statements to your Acme\Application class because of the size of that list. There's two answers to that.

First, there is a bit of basic PHP knowledge about the "use" statement. You can address explicit classes with it, like you did in use Acme\Application as App;, but you can also address namespace prefixes, like use Acme\Models; and make use of it like this: new Models\User. This will both shorten the list of use statements (because one statement will cover more than one used class), and also make the code more readable because you have to add more namespace as context (new User; is less descriptive than new Models\User). Readability is a good thing, because you'll write the code only once, but read it plenty of times thereafter. And you don't want to invent alias names every time you encounter ambigous class names (which is a strong indicator that you should add that piece of context, and on the other hand always inventing alias names will likely start to confuse the reader).

Second, if you have to deal with a lot of classes, you have to deal with a lot of classes. There is no other way around but to separate the task that is dealing with all these classes. Then you still have to deal with all of them, but not in the same place. And you probably don't want to do everything that's done in this launch() method every time unless you know your application will need it right now in this request.

You may want to read about two topics: Dependency injection, and lazy loading, because I think your question is more directed towards application architecture.

Upvotes: 1

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