PHP 5.4 Trait Qwerks

Although the title may lead you to think otherwise; I actually really like Traits. I wish I had made the switch to 5.4 sooner! Bundle them with the shorter array syntax and I'm a happy PHP dev.

I recently experimented with Traits in a Laravel package. You can find the package here DatController

This blog is contains a couple of the not-so-obvious points of traits which I came accross.

You can not override trait properties

I think this is what I like the least about traits. You can not set a default property and have a class override it.

<?php
trait NewTrait {
	public $variable = 'default value';
}

class NewClass {
	use NewTrait;
	
	public $variable = 'override value';
}

I would love to be able to override trait properties. However, you could argue that it's best to use inheritence for these situations.

You can not use two traits that both require the use the same trait.

This one is a little more tricky to explain.

As an example say you have the following set up:

• BaseTrait - a trait with core methods that you want included in all your other traits.
• CreateTrait - a trait dedicated to a create method.
• UpdateTrait - a trait dedicated to a update method.
• ResourceTrait - a trait which includes CreateTrait, UpdateTrait, DestroyTrait etc so that a developer doesn't have to include them all seperately.

trait BaseTrait {
	public function base_method()
	{
	}
}

trait CreateTrait {
	use BaseTrait;
	public function create()
	{
	}
}

trait UpdateTrait {
	use BaseTrait;
	public function update()
	{
	}
}

trait ResourceTrait {
	use CreateTrait;
	use UpdateTrait;
}

Because both CreateTrait and UpdateTrait include the BaseTrait you will receive the following error:

Trait method base_method has not been applied, because there are collisions with other trait methods on ResourceTrait

Even though it's the exact same method it will create a collision.

That's all for now. I definitely want to use traits more in PHP but I do feel they are quite restrictive in some situations.