Extending Zend_Controller_Router_Route: the singleton problem.

Geoffrey — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:37:00 +0100

Today I ran into an issue while extending Zend_Controller_Router_Route. I wanted to add a little path pre/post processing in the match() and assemble() methods, so I just extended the Route class to add my tiny bits of code into the methods. Except it did not work at all. After a few debuging, it turned out that the Router uses Zend_Controller_Router_Route::getInstance() to retrieve a route object, which uses a new self(); statement to instantiate the route object. Problem is that self always refers to the current class definition we're in, if the method is called from a child class, without being overloaded, self will refer to the wrong class.

Example:

class Foo {

        public static function getInstance() {

                return new self;

        }

}



class Bar extends Foo {}



var_dump(Bar::getClass());

echoes something like:

object(Foo)#1 (0) {
}

Which is fscking wrong IMHO. A quick workaround is to overload the getInstance method, which is what I call pretty annoying as it does not follow the DRY principle.

Mirmo Dynamics - dry

Extending Zend_Controller_Router_Route: the singleton problem.