accessor and mutator?

Question

when using doctrine i stumble upon these 2 words: accessor and mutator.

are these only used in doctrine or are they specific for php?

and what do they mean?

thanks

Answer 1

They're just fancy terms for getters and setters.

class MyClass
{
    private $prop;

    // Accessor (or Getter)
    public function getProp()
    {
        return $this->prop;
    }


    // Mutator (or Setter)
    public function setProp($value)
    {
        $this->prop = $value;
    }

}

Answer 2

Shouldn't we be using __get and __set in php5 and later now?

Answer 3

If I understand you correctly these 2 are specific to I guess any object oriented programming language. The point is that accessor is a method or a function which provides access to private fields in your class and mutator method allows to modify the private fields. I can go on writing about this, but I suggest you just google these, and you'll get lots of information about it. Its all about encapsulation <- suggest you to look up that term as well.

Answer 4

They aren't just different terms for getters and setters, at least not in Laravel.

To quote the documentation: "Accessors and mutators allow you to format Eloquent attributes when retrieving them from a model or setting their value."

https://laravel.com/docs/master/eloquent-mutators

So, you could say that getters and setters are a subset of accessors and mutators which change the data by a factor of zero.

Put it another way, if I wanted to get a raw field "cost" from a table, I would use a getter. If I wanted to get that field expressed and formatted in pounds and pence, then I could use an accessor.

There are other ways I could go about it, but that's one option.