Comments on: Managing “soft” relations between PHP objects

By: Les

Les — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:43:15 +0000

> I don’t know much about this pattern but it sounds pretty close to it.

In simpler terms, yes as the Registry is just your basic container and little else; what this article speculates about is more akin to a Service Locator but in which case why bother?

Go the whole hog and go with a Dependency Injection solution instead which would offer you far more flexibility abeit slightly more complexity…

Could your brain cope with that?

By: David

David — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:12:56 +0000

Some further research showed that you could see the ObjectResolver as something similar to a “dictionary” pattern. What it does in the end is nothing more than looking up objects for given keys. The interface to ask other objects for their dictionary entries is only 1 possibility to use this.

Of course you could also losen the strict “className” parameter and make it some universal key instead – the changes to the code would be minimal (removing lines 26 to 29 of sfObjectResolver.class.php). Until I have another need for it I think I will keep it as it is though – at the moment it’s perfect for my needs.

By: David

David — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 04:51:04 +0000

@Ryan: I will provide an actual example in (hopefully) a few days – I already use the code, but it’s not nice enough yet for publication

@Nicolas: As far as I can tell I see no direct connection to the “Registry” pattern. I haven’t checked though if there already is an “official” pattern describing what I did here.

By: Nicolas Martin

Nicolas Martin — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:06:22 +0000

Nice !

Is your solution related with the ‘Registry’ design pattern ?

I don’t know much about this pattern but it sounds pretty close to it.

By: Ryan Weaver

Ryan Weaver — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:41:52 +0000

Interesting – a bit outside of the box for me – but I really like it. I wonder where you learned this from and exactly how you use it inside Symfony? I understand your example use at the very end, but in Symfony (assuming author and article are Propel/Doctrine objects), this relationship isn’t “soft” – it’s quite straightforward. Where exactly do you find that this method really comes in handy?