Classes guide

Classes contain the logic behind the elemental objects that are used within a Cherrycake application.

Classes encapsulate object-specific logic, and they also come in two flavors:

• Core classes

  • Ready-made classes provided by Cherrycake, providing useful object entities to interact with Cherrycake functionalities like the Action or the RequestParameter, and other generalist classes to use throughout your code like the Item or the Image classes.

• App classes

  • Classes created by the developer to encapsulate object logic, often inheriting from core classes like Item.

  • For example, in an e-commerce web application you might need a Product class, a ProductCategory class and perhaps a CartItem class, all them might extend the Item core class.

Loading classes

Classes are automatically loaded the first time they're used, so you don't have to worry to include them anywhere.

For example, to create an Image object, just do this anywhere in your code:

$image = new \Cherrycake\Image;

Likewise, to create an object of a class you've created (an App class), just remember to specify our app's namespace instead of \Cherrycake\:

$product = new \CherrycakeApp\Product;

You can also add use statements at the top of your file so you don't need to prefix class names each time you want to use them, like this:

use Cherrycake;

$image = new Image;

App class files

The App classes you create must be stores in the /src directory of your app, and the file name must match the class name, plus the .php extension. Unlike modules, classes do not need their own directory under /src.

Note that class file names are case-sensitive.