PHP classes: Need help to inherit two classes

Question

I need help in designing my PHP classes where I need to extend from multiple classes.

I have a general class, Pagination.php that does all sort of pagination and sorting. All other classes will use this for pagination.

To make my life easier, I made a class generator that generates a class from MySQL table. All the properties, getters, setters and common methods are created automatically, which really saves time and money.

As an example, class Staff_Base in Staff_Base.php is generated automatically from SQL table t_staff.

Since class Staff_Base is automatically generated from SQL table, any 'custom' methods / properties are located in another class that extends Staff_Base.php. (So that whenever a new field is added, I can simply regenerate Staff_Base class and overwrite in Staff_Base.php).

So I have class Staff.php that extends Staff_Base.php.

The problem is, Staff.php also needs to extend another class, Pagination.php. (The current workaround is to put methods in Pagination.php into every class. This is really troublesome whenever I make changes to the pagination/sorting methods.)

How do I do this? What is the best design pattern to achieve this?

I know common suggestions to restructure my classes, but I really think hard of other workaround/solution. Also, I may also need to extend other classes than Pagination.php.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Can you have your generated Staff_Base class inherit from Pagination? Or does Staff_Base already inherit from another base class (that you do not have control over)...

Sounds like either Doctrine or Propel, I do not recall which uses the *_Base class system.

My suggestion would be to rewrite pagination to be able to be used by your entity classes instead of requiring your entity classes to extend it.