The ShortNameLocator Interface

Overview

Within Zend Framework applications, it’s often expedient to provide a mechanism for using class aliases instead of full class names to load adapters and plugins, or to allow using aliases for the purposes of slipstreaming alternate implementations into the framework.

In the first case, consider the adapter pattern. It’s often unwieldy to utilize a full class name (e.g., Zend\Cloud\DocumentService\Adapter\SimpleDb); using the short name of the adapter, SimpleDb, would be much simpler.

In the second case, consider the case of helpers. Let us assume we have a “url” helper; you may find that while the shipped helper does 90% of what you need, you’d like to extend it or provide an alternate implementation. At the same time, you don’t want to change your code to reflect the new helper. In this case, a short name allows you to alias an alternate class to utilize.

Classes implementing the ShortNameLocator interface provide a mechanism for resolving a short name to a fully qualified class name; how they do so is left to the implementers, and may combine strategies defined by other interfaces, such as PluginClassLocator.

Quick Start

Implementing a ShortNameLocator is trivial, and requires only three methods, as shown below.

namespace Zend\Loader;

interface ShortNameLocator
{
    public function isLoaded($name);
    public function getClassName($name);
    public function load($name);
}

Configuration Options

This component defines no configuration options, as it is an interface.

Available Methods

isLoaded

Is the requested plugin loaded? isLoaded($name)

isLoaded() Implement this method to return a boolean indicating whether or not the class has been able to resolve the plugin name to a class.

getClassName

Get the class name associated with a plugin name getClassName($name)

getClassName() Implement this method to return the class name associated with a plugin name.

load

Resolve a plugin to a class name load($name)

load() This method should resolve a plugin name to a class name.

Examples

Please see the Quick Start for the interface specification.