Ten minutes To PHP Objects

Written by Mike James

Thursday, 18 November 2021

Article Index
Ten minutes To PHP Objects
Methods
Inheritance
Buttons

Page 4 of 4

Finally all we need is a method to generate the appropriate HTML:

public function output()
{
 for($y=1;$y<=$this->ver;$y++)
 {
  for($x=1;$x<=$this->hor;$x++)
  {
   print "<input type=button ";
   print "value=".$this->names[$x][$y]." ";
   print "name=B".$y.$x.">\n";
  }
  print "\n<br>\n";
 }
}

The only complicated part of this method is the print statement which builds up an HTML tag something like:

<input type=button value=caption 
                       name= Browcolumn>

where caption is the value stored in the appropriate location of the $names array and rowcolumn is simply the row and column number that the button is in.

For example, the first button is:

<input type=button value=caption name= B11>

then:

<input type=button value=caption name= B12>

and so on.
If you enter all of this code into the file “buttonpad.inc” you can make use of it in a PHP page using something like:

<?php
include("buttonpad.inc");
?>
<html>
 <head>
  <title>Buttons demo</title>
 </head>
 <body>
 <?php
  $pad=new buttonpad(3,3);
  $pad->SetSequentialLabels();
  $pad->output();?>
 </body>
</html>

Notice that the “include” has to be the first item in the page and that the included file has to start with <?php and end with >>. This might look complicated by notice that the PHP program is just:

$pad=new buttonpad(3,3);
$pad->SetSequentialLabels();
$pad->output();

and this generates a 3x3 labelled grid of buttons.

buttons

A button grid generated by a PHP class

Of course there are lots of big and small improvements you can make to the class. For example, it seems to make sense to allocate a default labelling for the buttons and this can be best done in the constructor:

public function __constructor($n,$m)
{
 $this->hor=$n;
 $this->ver=$m;
 $this->SetSequentialLabels();
}

It is very easy to create PHP classes that make use of state or session information. This makes it possible to take an object-oriented approach to problems such as user tracking - simply define a User class and create an instance for each user. In the same way you could build a shopping system based on a shopping cart class and so on. And when it comes to database manipulation, objects were just made for the job! The point is that there are times when an object-oriented approach really is justified and other times when you are probably better off just writing PHP script functions.

To access the final example as a php program file, once you have registered, click on CodeBin.

If you would like to know more about using objects to generate HTML see:

Object-oriented HTML generation

Introduction to PHP

phpcover

Getting started
Getting Started With NetBeans PHP - Local Projects
What PHP Does
PHP Variables and Expressions for Complete Beginners
PHP Control Structures 1 - if and else
PHP Control Structures 2 - switch and elseif
PHP loops
Advanced loops
Functions
Ten minutes to PHP objects
PHP Inner Functions And Closure
NetBeans Remote Projects and debugging

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