It should be made clear that from an OOP theory perspective the use of this method is very bad practice in the same manner as goto, eval and singletons. If you find a need to use it in production code you're almost certainly doing something wrong somewhere. It may occasionally be useful for debugging, but even then hints at poor initial code.
The problem? It breaks encapsulation. An object can exist in the application but may not be able to fulfill its responsibility because it's missing dependencies. The use of this method makes it possible for an incomplete object to exist in the system; the object can exist in a state that its author never intended. This is bad because it will cause unexpected things to happen! A fundamental principle in OOP is that objects are in complete control of their state, the use of this method prevents that guarantee.
n.b. The annotation based "dependency injection" listed below is not a solution or valid use-case for this either because it breaks encapsulation (Among other things!) and the class being constructed needs to know of the container by providing annotations.
ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor
(PHP 5 >= 5.4.0, PHP 7, PHP 8)
ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor — Creates a new class instance without invoking the constructor
Descrição
Creates a new instance of the class without invoking the constructor.
Parâmetros
Valor Retornado
Erros/Exceções
A ReflectionException if the class is an internal class that cannot be instantiated without invoking the constructor. This exception is limited only to internal classes that are final.
Veja Também
- ReflectionClass::newInstance() - Creates a new class instance from given arguments
- ReflectionClass::newInstanceArgs() - Creates a new class instance from given arguments
add a note
User Contributed Notes 7 notes
tom at r dot je ¶
11 years ago
oliver at ananit dot de ¶
13 years ago
If this method is not available in your version of PHP you can use a trick to create an instance without calling the constructor.
Use reflection to get the properties and default values of the class, and create a fake "serialized" string.
<?php
function createInstanceWithoutConstructor($class){
$reflector = new ReflectionClass($class);
$properties = $reflector->getProperties();
$defaults = $reflector->getDefaultProperties();
$serealized = "O:" . strlen($class) . ":\"$class\":".count($properties) .':{';
foreach ($properties as $property){
$name = $property->getName();
if($property->isProtected()){
$name = chr(0) . '*' .chr(0) .$name;
} elseif($property->isPrivate()){
$name = chr(0) . $class. chr(0).$name;
}
$serealized .= serialize($name);
if(array_key_exists($property->getName(),$defaults) ){
$serealized .= serialize($defaults[$property->getName()]);
} else {
$serealized .= serialize(null);
}
}
$serealized .="}";
return unserialize($serealized);
}
?>
Example:
<?php
class foo
{
public $a = 10;
protected $b = 2;
private $c = "default";
protected $d;
public function __construct(){
$this->a = null;
$this->b = null;
$this->c = "constructed";
$this->d = 42;
}
}
var_dump(createInstanceWithoutConstructor('foo'));
?>
Output:
object(foo)#6 (4) {
["a"]=>
int(10)
["b":protected]=>
int(2)
["c":"foo":private]=>
string(7) "default"
["d":protected]=>
NULL
}
I hope this can help someone.
Oliver Anan
260 at ciemnosc ¶
8 years ago
sorry for replying to such an old comment, but there's something i wanted to point out.
@ tom at r dot je:
While I agree with what you said in general, there *are* cases where it's not true, and since PHP doesn't allow for multiple constructors there's no other good way around it.
> The problem? It breaks encapsulation.
> An object can exist in the application but may not be able to fulfill its
> responsibility because it's missing dependencies.
> The use of this method makes it possible for an incomplete object
> to exist in the system;
> the object can exist in a state that its author never intended.
If you're using this method from some factory method, to manually init the object in other way that the constructor that, this point is no longer valid.
Consider the example, where you use constructor to set-up the object after getting it from database (e.g. you need to pull some array from other table, basing on some id parameter). But you want to also be able to create object manually (for inserting to the database, for example).
The best thing to do would be to have two different constructors, but since it is not possible in php you need some other way to create the object.
example:
<?php
// this usually would be a static cache in some class, or array returned by method getMeta($id), etc.
$meta = array(1337 => array('key1' => 'value1', 'key2' => 'value2'));
class Test {
public $id;
public $data;
public $meta;
public function __construct() {
global $meta;
if(is_int($this->id)) $this->meta = $meta[$this->id];
}
public static function create_empty() {
$r = new ReflectionClass(__CLASS__);
return $r->newInstanceWithoutConstructor();
}
}
echo "emulating PDO::FETCH_CLASS behavior: ";
$t = Test::create_empty();
$t->meta = 1337;
$t->__construct();
var_dump($t);
echo "empty class: ";
$testItem = Test::create_empty();
// ... here you can start setting up the item, e.g. from XML
var_dump($testItem);
$testItem->id = 0;
$testItem->data = "some data";
$testItem->meta = array("somekey" => "somevalue");
echo "after setup:";
var_dump($testItem);
?>
Of course, you can instead make empty constructor, and create some init() method, but then you have to remember to call init() everywhere.
You can also create some other way of adding the item to database, but then you'd have to classes to handle the same data - one for retrieving and other for storing.
If you instead use some factory class (or just a factory method, like in the simplified example above) having a way to create totally empty object is useful. With full factory approach you would first use some TestFactory->prepare() method, then you'd call methods to set what you need, and the factory would set all uninitialized variables to some default values upon calling TestFactory->get() to retrieve prepared object.
alejosimon at gmail ¶
13 years ago
A good first use for this new method.
It implements a transparent parser constructor argument to achieve 99% reusable component.
<?php
use ReflectionClass ;
trait TSingleton
{
/**
* Constructor.
*/
protected function __construct() {}
/**
* Drop clone singleton objects.
*/
protected function __clone() {}
/**
* Gets only one instance.
*
* @params Optional multiple values as arguments for the constructor.
* @return Object instance from called class.
*/
public static function getInstance()
{
static $instance = null ;
if ( ! $instance )
{
$ref = new ReflectionClass( get_called_class() ) ;
$ctor = $ref->getConstructor() ;
// Thanks PHP 5.4
$self = $ref->newInstanceWithoutConstructor() ;
// The magic.
$ctor->setAccessible( true ) ;
$instance = $ctor->invokeArgs( $self, func_get_args() ) ;
}
return $instance ;
}
}
?>
me [ata] thomas-lauria.de ¶
12 years ago
This new Feature enables Annotation based Dependency Injection:
<?php
//dependency to inject
class dep {}
class a {
/**
* @inject
* @var dep
*/
protected $foo;
}
class b extends a {
/**
* @inject
* @var dep
*/
protected $bar;
public function __construct() {
echo "CONSTRUCTOR CALLED\n";
}
}
$ref = new ReflectionClass('b');
$inst = $ref->newInstanceWithoutConstructor();
$list = $ref->getProperties();
foreach($list as $prop){
/* @var $prop ReflectionProperty */
$prop->getDocComment(); //grep for @inject and the @vars class name
$prop->setAccessible(true);
$prop->setValue($inst, new dep());
}
if($const = $ref->getConstructor()) {
$constName = $const->getName();
$inst->{$constName}(); //use call_user_func_array($function, $param_arr); for arguments
}
print_r($inst);
print_r($inst->foo); //property still not accessable
The Output:
CONSTRUCTOR CALLED
b Object
(
[bar:protected] => dep Object
(
)
[foo:protected] => dep Object
(
)
)
PHP Fatal error: Cannot access protected property b::$foo in diTest.php on line 42
benoit dot wery at online dot fr ¶
1 year ago
Using ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor and ReflectionProperty::setValue allow to set a value for a readonly promoted property. For example this code works (tested on PHP 8.2) :
<?php
class Test
{
public function __construct(public readonly string $name)
{}
}
$test1 = new Test('test1');
$reflectionProperty = new ReflectionProperty(Test::class, 'name');
// next line would throw a Fatal error
$reflectionProperty->setValue($test1, 'error');
$reflectionClass = new ReflectionClass(Test::class);
$test2 = $reflectionClass->newInstanceWithoutConstructor();
$reflectionProperty->setValue($test2, 'test2');
echo $test2->name; // will output "test2"
ben at NOSPAM dot fanmade dot de ¶
3 years ago
Such a function should definitely end up in productive code as rarely as possible.
There are always exceptions though :)
We have UseCase classes in our library extending an abstract UseCase having a constructor that does some setting up and it will even throw exceptions if some specific conditions are not yet met.
Within that UseCase the permissions are also defined.
Simplified example:
<?php
abstract class UseCase implements IUseCase
{
/** @var string[] */
protected array $requiredPermissions = [];
final public function __construct(IPresenter $out)
{
// several startup checks, including authorization
}
}
?>
We already have a better solution, but it will take some time to refactor that and we will have to live with this for at least a few weeks.
Now I've had the idea to check the permissions in the application's incoming request way before the individual UseCase will be initialized.
So after seeing this method here I just introduced this little helper into our abstract UseCase:
<?php
public static function getRequiredPermissions(): array
{
$class = new ReflectionClass(get_called_class());
return $class->newInstanceWithoutConstructor()->requiredPermissions;
}
?>
Now I'm able to check the permissions in my request without really touching anything in the library:
<?php
public function authorize(): bool
{
if (!$this->user->hasPermissions(CreatePost::getRequiredPermissions())) {
return false;
}
return true;
}
?>
This does also have the benefit of adding one more reason to switch to our new UseCase classes ASAP :)
