Hi all,

In Professional PHP5, Chapters 5 & 9, there are discussions on how to implement collections of a base object. For the most part, these seem redundant to me, and the GenericObjectCollection class in Chapter 9 is the same as the Collection class, except it's DB-aware. I'm trying to think through a way to efficiently combining their functionality. Possible idea is below. DBObject is my renamed GenericObject, and pointless code is removed.

class Group extends DBObject
{
  private $_users;
  ...
  public function __construct()
  {
    ...
    $this->_users = new Collection();
    $this->_users->setLoadCallback('_loadUsers', $this);
  }
  ...

  public function _loadUsers(Collection $col)
  {
    // this is where, I guess, I would put some condensed implementation of GenericObjectCollection's loading logic?
  }
}

As you can see, I'm guessing that Collection's lazy-instantiation callback, _loadUsers, is where I would do some DB ops, like is described in GenericObjectCollection, to get all matching User objects from the User table in one query (using "... WHERE id IN (list-of-userids)"). But I guess I'm getting hung up on just how much screwing I can do with this. Maybe my head's just fuzzy from trying to code on a Saturday night.

Ideas on this? Thanks!

--Scott