PHP & Retrospection How to retrospect without knowing class in advance

Question

I want to use Retrospection to call specific functions on a class that I don't know.

I have a directory where PHP files are stored. I have another directory where my current PHP class is stored like:

C:/ PHP-dir
      |
      ---FilesDir
      |    |
      |    ----SomeClass.php
      |    ----OtherClass.php
      |
      ---MyProgDir
           |
           ----MyClassWithRetrospection.php

In MyClassWithRetrospection I read all files from FilesDir, I strip the '.php'from the filename and use the resulting string as a Class name.

So if I do a "new RetrospectionClass('SomeClass');" I get an exception telling me it can't find SomeClass in the directory where MyClassWithRetrospection is located. Duh, I know that.

As I don't know which classes are in the FilesDir I can't do an include/required in my MyClassWithRetrospection.php file.

So does anyone know how to make the content of the FilesDir directory available at runtime?

Regards, Werner

Answer 1

You need to just include it at runtime, which means you have to follow a convention for naming your files, or you have to have a huge array of where each file is located. Assuming SomeClass.php contains a class called SomeClass, when you do

new RetrospectionClass($className);

You would first do

include_once '../FilesDir/'.$className.'.php'