CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpoopencapsulation
Besasam
Besasam

Reputation: 47

Encapsulation in object oriented PHP - when is it really needed?

I know this is kind of a question of faith and has been asked many times before, but the answers I've found were either too general, didn't apply to my use case, or didn't satisfy otherwise.

I'm currently building an application that uses classes as representation for database tables. These classes don't offer any methods of their own, I've written a parser class for each one that works with their objects and returns the data in the format I need, which makes the parent classes nothing more than data storages and makes a nice distinction between data and logic.

Now, the consensus in OOP seems to be that you always have to use getters and setters instead of accessing class attributes directly.

An argument I've often heard is that using getters and setters gives the possibility of extending those functions later on, but in my opinion this goes against YAGNI and some other concepts I can't remember the name of right now - that a method should do exactly what you would expect from its name. If I wanted to do something more than simply set a value, I would write a new method, not put that into my setter method, since that one is, per definition, only supposed to set attributes. So I might as well skip the setter and just access the attribute directly.

Another one is that you can put validation in your setters, which I already do in my API that accesses these classes. In my opinion you shouldn't just pass values and have the object tell you if your value is okay or not, but instead validate those values first before you pass them to the object.

I do understand the purpose of private/protected attributes in "usual" classes, but when the class is literally just a data container without any methods, is this really needed? In other words: is there a glaring disadvantage to using public values, when the setter methods for those (were they private) would all just look like public function getAttr($attr) { $this->atrr = $attr; } anyway?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 528

Answers (1)

RWRkeSBZ
RWRkeSBZ

Reputation: 753

You only need a data structure, but the only suitable PHP construct is the class.

Typically, in object-oriented analysis, design and programming, a class is a model of a thing or concept and it encapsulates any knowledge and/or behaviour of the thing or concept.

However, in the context of this question, encapsulation is not needed since you only require a data structure.

Upvotes: 1

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