[UPHPU] Child class references static variable of parent instead of its own

[Richard K Miller]

On Aug 17, 2007, at 1:23 PM, Ray Hunter wrote:

>> Do you see anyway around this? My parent class is a generic database
>> table wrapper to provide ORM mapping. Each child class maps to a
>> specific table. I'd like to implement several static functions  
>> such as
>> search_by(), a factory pattern that returns an object or objects  
>> of its
>> own class that match the search. I see no way to define the database
>> table in a child class and have it passed back to a static  
>> function in
>> the parent class.
>
> you might want to override the parent classes implementation. or  
> create
> an abstract method in parent that gets overriden in the child.
>

Ray, I'm not sure I understand.

By the way, it appears this issue is well documented in the comments  
of the get_class() function. For example, another impossibility  
raised by this bug is extending a Singleton class:

http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.get-class.php#usernotes

This comment seemed to summarize it well:
"Basically these design patterns, and various other meta  
manipulations (things which operate on the nature of the object, not  
on the data the object holds) could benefit greatly from knowing  
exactly what the final type of this object is, and not having native  
access to this information obligates work-arounds."
Richard