File Directory and autoloading issue PHP MVC

Question

Im building a MVC PHP framework and am having some issues with autoloading my classes, which i think might be down to my file structure.

Firstly, here is my file structure:

Im testing developing in an Xampp localserver environment so this is why i have the private and public folders. Eventually on a live server the private folders will be in the server root and the public folders will be in the public_html directory.

Does my file structure look about right? in the private, frontend folder ill have all my different modules in directorys which inturn has a controller, model, view files which hold the neccessary files for each module.

I have created this autoloader so far:

    //Require config and router classes
require_once('router.class.php');
require_once('config.php');

spl_autoload_register(null, false);

spl_autoload_extensions('.class.php');

function autoloader_core($class){
    $filename = strtolower($class) . '.class.php';

    if(!file_exists($filename)){
        echo $filename . " not found";
    }
    include $filename;
}

function autoloader_app($class){
    $filename = strtolower($class) . '.class.php';
    $file = 'C:\xampp\htdocs\simplebids\simplebidsprivate\app/' . $filename;

    if(!file_exists($file)){
        echo $file . " not found";
    }
    include $file;
}

spl_autoload_register('autoloader_core');
spl_autoload_register('autoloader_app');

$router = new test;
$router->say_hello();

This works perfect for the classes within the lib->core directory, but when i try to instantiate a new test class i get all sorts of errors about not finding the test.class.php file in the lib->core file, which it obviously isn't but i thought the autoloader function would be looking in the path defined by myself in the "autoloader_app" function.

The funny thing is even though i get all these errors, the string i echo in the test function say_hello() does get echoed after the errors.

So in short the file isnt being found according to the errors, but it is because i can see the echo i made the classes function print.

Any ideas why?

Also my frontend module file structure, is this going to make autoloading very difficult as ill need a different autoloading function for every module and then every controller/model/view file in it? will i need a seperate autoloading function for every module? If not how would i go about it?

Thanks Tom

Answer 1

I would suggest the following approach. It is what I use for my own projects (including an MVC framework)

First, follow these rules:

• One class/trait/interface per file.
• Use the class/trait/interface name lowercased, as the file name. E.g. class Foo would be "foo.php"
• Store namespaced class/trait/interface files in a directory tree matching the namespaces, with lowercase names. e.g. class \Foo\Bar\Baz would be "/foo/bar/baz.php"

Then, to activate the simplest autoloading you've ever seen:

Add the director(y/ies) containing all class files/directories to the php include path:

set_include_path(get_include_path() . PATH_SEPARATOR . ROOT_DIR . "/lib");

Load the builtin autoloader:

spl_autoload_register('spl_autoload', false);

So to give an example, this is the directory structure of my apps commonly:

Project Root/
|-apptopnamespace/
| |-controllers/
| | |-dashboard.php
| | |-users.php   
| |-models/
| | |-user.php   
| | |-item.php   
| |-etc/
| |-appname.php
| |-router.php
|-bootstrap.php

To simplify it, the framework has a method to setup stuff like autoloading, include paths etc.

So the following call is made in bootstrap.php. The argument could easily have more paths in the array (e.g. [__DIR__, __DIR__ . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'lib'] if you have a nested "lib" directory in the project folder):

Bamboo::configure([__DIR__]);

Internally the framework then (amongst other things) calls these two methods:

/**
 * Add one or more paths to the include path
 *
 * @param array $paths an array of paths to add to the include path
 */
protected static function addIncludePath(array $paths) {
    set_include_path(
        get_include_path() . PATH_SEPARATOR . implode(
            PATH_SEPARATOR,
            $paths
        )
    );
}

/**
 * Register the SPL Autoloader
 */
protected static function setupAutoload() {
    // Don't clobber any __autoload already defined
    if (function_exists('__autoload')) {
        spl_autoload_register('__autoload', false);
    }

    spl_autoload_register('spl_autoload', false);
}