Restrict Calling Class

PHP
1

I have a Page class that creates out events. One of those is the UserAuth event, which gets a User entity object from the database and returns it to the page.

Now I want to protect the page’s copy of the user object as much as possible, but writing has to be public to the UserAuth class or any class that extends it.

I know it’s possible to see the calling function’s class using debug_trace. My question is this - would using that to restrict access to the function be a good idea?

Hmm… No - better idea.

public function setUserAuthModule ( UserAuthModule $userAuth) {
$this->userAuth = $userAuth;
}

And the userAuth module simple calls
$this->page->setUserAuthModule( $this );

I quite literally thought up that better approach while typing this up and it’s sound. That said, would that prior idea ever be sane? I doubt it - it just feels like a clumsy means of trying to enforce “friend” status in PHP.

2

Seems odd to want to enforce this. If a class has an API why display a different API to certain objects?

Extend the class with the “hidden” function and pass that extended version to places you want to see it.

3

Again, better just to have the userauth object pass itself, then I can use type hinting to insure the caller at the very least is sending an userauth object. I felt the debug tracing was a bad idea before I even started typing but typed all the same time and arrived at the proper idea. I figured it be amusing to hit send and show my insanity in action - I considered deleting the first post. :x

I don’t even know why I had the idea - it doesn’t seem like it could ever be useful - just confusing as hell to the maintenance programmer.