Defining class methods in PHP

Question

Is it possible in PHP (as it is in C++) to declare a class method OUTSIDE the class definition?

Answer 1

You could perhaps override __call or __callStatic to locate a missing method at runtime, but you'd have to make up your own system for locating and calling the code. For example, you could load a "Delegate" class to handle the method call.

Here's an example - if you tried to call $foo->bar(), the class would attempt to create a FooDelegate_bar class, and call bar() on it with the same arguments. If you've got class auto-loading set up, the delegate can live in a separate file until required...

class Foo {

    public function __call($method, $args) {
        $delegate="FooDelegate_".$method;
        if (class_exists($delegate))
        {
             $handler=new $delegate($this);
             return call_user_func_array(array(&$handler, $method), $args);
        }


    }

}