Form inputs to class properties

Question

I'm trying to learn OO PHP and I'm working on a contents manager project, I want to construct an object starting from an html form.

For example, if I have a form with ten textbox (or other types of input), I sent the form in POST mode, then I want to construct my object starting from POST data.

Do I have to pass them as constructor's parameters, or as an array? How?

Just an example:

My little form: Name, Surname, Description (but there might be over ten inputs)

My $_POST array: ('name'=>'Mario', 'surname'=>'Rossi', 'description'=>'Just a description here.')

My class:

class Person {
    private $name;
    private $surname;
    private $description;

    public function __contruct(/*arguments or array here*/) {
    }
}

Answer 1

A clean and easy solution is to use the json_decode and json_encode functions.

http://php.net/json_decode

$object = json_decode(json_encode($_POST['formdata']), FALSE);

json_decode converts your formdata to an serialized object and the second parameter of json_encode (false) prevents the data from being converted back to an array .

Answer 2

Don't directly use $_POST in the function rather send it as parameter to the function

Function call from CLASS object:

$args = array(
   'val1' => $_POST['val1'],
   'val2' => $_POST['val2'],
   'val3' => $_POST['val3']
);
$obj->funct($args);

Function definition in CLASS:

public function funct ($param = array()) {
   print_r( $param );
}

Answer 3

If your form has data beyond one Person , then one Person is not enough to represent your form!

Have a class PersonForm (or whatever name it may be), and pass in the $_POST array as an argument.

The PersonForm can then create (either by new or by using a PersonFactory class) the Person objects using some of the data from the array.