Workaround for overloaded constructor in PHP

Question

I have a class whose purpose is to display a comment. I'd like to be able to instantiate it by passing a Comment object if I happen to have it available, or just the values if that's what I have available at the time. Unfortunately PHP doesn't allow overloaded constructors, so here's the workaround I came up with.

class CommentPanel extends Panel {
    //Private Constructor, called only from MakeFrom methods
    private function CommentPanel($text, $userName, $timestamp) {
        parent::Panel(0, $top, System::Auto, System::Auto);

        // Render comment
    }

    public static function MakeFromObject(Comment $comment) {
        return new CommentPanel($comment->text, $comment->User->nickname, $comment->last_updated_ts);
    }

    public static function MakeFromValues($text, $userName, $timestamp) {
        return new CommentPanel($text, $userName, $timestamp);
    }
}

So here's the two methods for instantiating a CommentPanel:

$cp = CommentPanel::MakeFromObject($comment);
// or...
$cp = CommentPanel::MakeFromValues($text, $user, $last_updated_ts);
// but not
$cp = new CommentPanel(); //Runtime error

I'm moderately satisfied, although it's not near as intuitive as an overloaded constructor. Any thoughts on improving this?

Answer 1

Given that php allows optional parameters and doesn't require type checking of parameters that are passed in, you can sort of "fake" an overloaded constructor.

something like this:

class CommentPanel extends Panel {
    public function __construct($text_or_comment, $username=null, $timestamp=null) {
        if (is_string($text_or_comment) {
            $this->textConstructor($text_or_comment, $username, $timestamp);
        }
        else { // assume that it's a comment since it's not a string ... there are better ways to handle this though
            $this->commentConstructor($text_or_comment);
        }
    }

    private function textConstructor($text, username, $timestampe) { /* . . . */ }
    private function commentConstructor(Comment $comment) { /* . . . */ }
}

This method will allow for a more consistent API and one that is perhaps more familiar to Java and C++ developers.

Also, I'm not positive which version of PHP you're targeting, but I believe in the current version, uses __construct instead of the class name as the constructor. I'm not sure if this is preferred but the documentation does say that it checks for __construct first and then the class name style constructor, so I would guess that using __construct() instead of CommentPanel() would reduce runtime ever so slightly. I'm not 100% sure on that though, that's just my understanding. Please correct me if I'm wrong :)