Getting the name of a child class in the parent class (static context)

Question

I\'m building an ORM library with reuse and simplicity in mind; everything goes fine except that I got stuck by a stupid inheritance limitation. Please consider the code bel

Answer 1

I know this question is really old, but for those looking for a more practical solution than defining a property in every class containing the class name:

You can use the static keyword for this.

As explained in this contributor note in the php documentation

the static keyword can be used inside a super class to access the sub class from which a method is called.

Example:

class Base
{
    public static function init() // Initializes a new instance of the static class
    {
        return new static();
    }

    public static function getClass() // Get static class
    {
        return static::class;
    }

    public function getStaticClass() // Non-static function to get static class
    {
        return static::class;
    }
}

class Child extends Base
{

}

$child = Child::init();         // Initializes a new instance of the Child class

                                // Output:
var_dump($child);               // object(Child)#1 (0) {}
echo $child->getStaticClass();  // Child
echo Child::getClass();         // Child