Does this function have too many parameters?

Question

In the end, I got this function. I don't know whether it's normal or not.

function user_registration($user_name, $user_email, $user_pass, $address, 
                           $city, $postalcode, $country, $phone, $mobilephone)

How and why can I improve this?

Answer 1

You could either pass an array with all variables packed nicely together, or just make a "User" class and add all properties via setters and do the validation in the end with a dedicated method:

class User {

  public function setName($name) {
    $this->name = $name;
  }

  [...]

  public function register() {

    //Validate input
    if (empty($this->name))
      $this->errors[] = "ERROR, Username must not be emtpy";

    //Add the user to the database
    //Your SQL query
    return empty($this->errors);
  }

}

$user = new User();
$user->setName("Peter");
$success = $user->register();

if (!$success)
  echo "ERRORS OCCURED: ".print_r($user->errors, true);

Answer 2

A solution would be to only have one parameter, that can contain several pieces of data -- like an array.

Your function could be defined this way :

function user_registration(array $data) {
    // work with $data['name']
    // and $data['email']
    // ...
}

And you'd call it like this :

user_registration(array(
    'name' => 'blah',
    'email' => '[email protected]', 
    'pass' => '123456',
    // and so on
));

Nice things are :

• You can add / remove "parameters" easily
• The "parameters" can be passed in any order you want

Not so bad things are :

• No hint while typing in your IDE
• No documentation (like phpDoc)