It’s about something about how to simply your life. E.g. sometimes you may want to store table names in your DB. The reasons why you may want it are different. E.g. I want to generate constants for reference tables and in order to do that I use the following approach:
$tables = sfDatabaseTablePeer::doSelect(new Criteria());
if ($tables) foreach($tables as $t) {
$object_name = sfInflector::camelize($t->getName().’Peer’);
$object = new $object_name;
$values = $object->doSelect(new Criteria());
}
So as you may see I create object dynamically. Thanks God that’s what PHP allows to do and the only thing we need is to make sure we generate correct class name. I must say somehow I’ve been trying to generate dynamically access to class peer attributes, e.g. ClassPeer::{$NAME} – and I was not able to make it working. I’ve made a few attempts and no luck.
So if someone has ever done that please, please let me know! 😛