Object Composition FTW!

In modern PHP, you're going to spend a lot of time working with other people's classes: via external libraries that you bring into your project to get things done faster. Of course, when you do that: you can't actually edit their code if you need to change or add some behavior.

Fortunately, OO code gives us some really neat ways to deal with this limitation.

Modifying a Class without Modifying it?

For the next few minutes, I want you to pretend like our PDOShipStorage is actually from a third-party library. In other words, we can't modify it.

Now, let's say whenever we call fetchAllShipsData(), it's really important for us to log to a file, how many ships were found. But if we can't edit this file, how can we do that?

Using Inheritance

There's actually two ways to do this, and both are pretty awesome. The first way is to create a new class that extends PDOShipStorage, like LoggablePDOShipStorage, and override some methods to add logging.

Nah, Use Composition

But forget that, let's skip to a better method called composition. First, create a new class in the Service directory called LoggableShipStorage, but do not extend PDOShipStorage:

Now, the only rule for any ship storage object is that it needs to implement the ShipStorageInterface. Add that, and then go to our handy "Code"->"Generate" method to implement the 2 methods we need:

So far, this is how every ship storage starts.

But LoggableShipStorage will not actually do any of the ship-loading work - it'll offload all that hard work to some other ship storage object, like PDOShipStorage. To do that, add a new private $shipStorage property and a public function __construct() method that accepts one ShipStorageInterface argument. Then, set that value onto the $shipStorage property:

For fetchAllShipData(), just return $this->shipStorage->fetchAllShipsData(). Repeat for the other method: return $this->shipStorage->fetchSingleShipData():

We've now created a wrapper object that offloads all of the work to an internal ship storage object. This is composition: you put one object inside of another.

To use the new class, open up Container. Inside getShipStorage(), add $this->shipStorage = new LoggableShipStorage() and pass it $this->shipStorage, which is the PDOShipStorage object:

We've just pulled a "fast one" on our application: our entire app thinks we're using PDOShipStorage, but we just changed that! If you refresh now, nothing is different: everything still eventually goes through the PDOShipStorage object.

But now, we have the opportunity to add more functionality - or to change functionality - in either of these methods.

Add some Logging!

To give a really simple example, replace the return statement with $ships = and add return $ships below that:

Between, we could call some new log() method, passing it a string like: just fetched %s ships - passing that a count() of $ships:

Below, add a new private function log() with a $message argument:

You should do something more intelligent in a real app, but to prove it's working, echo that message.

Let's refresh! There's our message!

Why is Composition Cool?

Wrapping one object inside of another like this is called composition. You see, when you want to change the behavior of an existing class, the first thing we always think of is

Oh, just extend that class and override some methods

But composition is another option, and it does have some subtle advantages. If we had extended PDOShipStorage and then later wanted to change back to our JsonFileShipStorage, then all of a sudden we would need to change our LoggableShipStorage to extend JsonFileShipStorage. But with composition, our wrapper class can work with any ShipStorageInterface. We could change just one line to go back to loading files from JSON and not lose our logging.

This isn't always a ground-breaking difference, but this is what people mean when they talk about "composition over inheritance".

Alright guys! I have tried to think of all the weird stuff that we haven't talked about with object oriented coding, and I've run out! You are now super qualified with this stuff - so get out there, find some classes, find some interfaces, make some traits, do some good, and just keep practicing. It's going to sink in more and more over time, and serve you for years to come, in many different languages.

See you next time!