PHP Magic Methods: Construct and Destruct

As a web developer, if you have ever looked at the source code of open source PHP projects, you might have noticed object methods that begin with a double underscore. These are Magic Methods that allow you to react to certain events when using these particular objects. This means when certain things happen to your object, you can define how it should react in that instance.

You’ve probably already come across a number of PHP’s magic methods already because some of them are really quite common. However, I believe in order to be a competent PHP developer, you do need a firm grasp of the tools you have at your disposal when working with Object Oriented PHP

In this article, I will explain the Construct and Destruct magic methods.

The most common of PHP’s magic method is the __construct() method. If you’ve been developing object oriented php application, I’m sure you are well aware of this method already. To know further original explanation about magic methods, visit php official website or Bangla Jobs's study section.

The __construct() method is automatically called when the object is first created. This means you can inject parameters and dependancies to set up the object.

For example:

When you create a new instance of the Tweet object, you can pass in parameters that will be injected into the __construct() method. As you can see, you don’t actually have to call the method as it will be automatically called for you.

When you extend an object, the parent object will sometimes also have a __construct() method that is expecting something to be injected into the object. You satisfy this requirement by calling the parent’s __construct() method:

When an object is destroyed the __destruct() method is fired. Again, as with the __construct() method, this is not something you have to trigger as PHP will take care of it for you.

The destruct method will allow you to cleanup anything that shouldn’t be around once the object has been destroyed. For example this could be a connection to an external service or database.

To be honest you don’t really see much of the __destruct() method. PHP is not really the type of language that you would be using for long running processes so I think for the most part you don’t really need to ever clean up anything using the __destruct() method. The lifecycle of a PHP request is so short, actually implementing the __destruct() method is probably more hassle than it’s worth.