PHP OOP: Unique method per argument type?
- by sunwukung
I'm writing a little homebrew ORM (academic interest). I'm trying to adhere to the TDD concept as a training exercise, and as part of that exercise I'm writing documentation for the API as I develop the class.
Case in point - I'm working on a classic "getCollection" type mapper class. I want it to be able to retrieve collections of asset X (let's say blog posts) for a specific user, and also collections based on an arbitrary array of numeric values. So - you might have a method like any one of these
$User = $UserMapper->load(1);
$ArticleCollection = $ArticleMapper->getCollection(range(10,20));
$ArticleCollection = $ArticleMapper->getCollection($User);
$ArticleCollection = $ArticleMapper->getCollection($User->getId());
So, in writing the documentation for the getCollection method - I want to declare the @param variable in the Docblock. Is it better to have a unique method for each argument type, or is it acceptable to have a method that delegates to the correct internal method/class based on argument type?
