Some time ago I read a post by Mathias Verraes about using static methods as named constructors in object oriented PHP. I thought that this technique is very practical, and that it has the potential for making code much more readable. However, it can be also used to make generating Exception messages less repititive.

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This technique can be used to improve code a lot, like Beau Simensen also shows in his example in this gist.

Recently I’ve seen another great usage of this pattern. Look at exception messages: the messages are usually defined all over the place in the project. The code for generating the exception messages is also very repetitive and not very readable.

Consider this pattern:

<?php

namespace foo;

function do_something_with_file($file)
{
    if (!file_exists($file) or !is_readable($file)) {
        throw new \Exception(sprintf('The file "%s" does either not exist or is not readable', $file));
    }

    // Do something with file
}

function do_something_else_with_file($file)
{
    if (!file_exists($file) or !is_readable($file)) {
        throw new \Exception(sprintf('The file "%s" does either not exist or is not readable', $file));
    }

    // Do something else with file
}

The messages are identical and even need the same parameter. We can improve this with a custom exception class¹ and named constructors to make it less repetitive and more concise.

I took this trick from Jeremy Lindblom’s Config Microlibrary, and I was told that libraries of the Doctrine project do this for at least a couple of years by now.

Here’s how an improved version could look:

<?php

namespace foo;

class Exception
{
    static function fileIsNotReadable($file)
    {
        return new self(sprintf(
            'The file "%s" does either not exist or is not readable', $file
        ));
    }
}

function do_something_with_file($file)
{
    if (!file_exists($file) or !is_readable($file)) {
        throw Exception::fileIsNotReadable($file);
    }

    // Do something with file
}

function do_something_else_with_file($file)
{
    if (!file_exists($file) or !is_readable($file)) {
        throw Exception::fileIsNotReadable($file);
    }

    // Do something else with file
}

This is better in a number of ways:

• All exception messages can be changed in one place
• Code for throwing the exceptions got more concise and shorter
• We have implemented a custom exception class which enables the users of our library to catch only the exceptions thrown by the library