Get grandparent instance of certain class in PHP

July 25, 2019 · PHP

Recently, I stumbled upon a scenario where I had to extend a class. Let’s say the class I was extending was Acme\Core\App\Item into Amit\Core\App\Item. And Acme\Core\App\Item was eventually extending a class Magento\Backend\Block\Widget\Grid\Extended.

Now, Acme\Core\App\Item has a protected method called _prepareColumns() which I’m overriding into Amit\Core\App\Item. But the thing here is, _prepareColumns() of class Acme\Core\App\Item is calling a parent class’ function (i.e. Magento\Backend\Block\Widget\Grid\Extended) _prepareColumns() using keyword parent.

namespace Acme\Core\App

class Item extends \Magento\Backend\Block\Widget\Grid\Extended
{
    protected function prepareColumns()
    {
        // code commmented for brevity
        return parent::_prepareColumns();
    }
}

I had to somehow utilize that method in my method which I had overrided earlier. But, I could not use parent because that would simply through a fatal error because there exists no method called _prepareColumns() in class Acme\Core\App\Item.

namespace Amit\Core\App

class Item extends \Acme\Core\App\Item
{
    protected function prepareColumns()
    {
        // code commmented for brevity
        return parent::_prepareColumns(); // Results in a fatal error
    }
}

Turn out, in such scenario you need to use call the grandparent of the class instead of using parent::. But how? Take the short method I wrote to figure it out.

/**
 * Get the grand parent class of the specified class
 *
 * @param $currentClass
 * @return string
*/
private function get_grandparent_class($currentClass)
{
    if (is_object($currentClass)) {
        $currentClass = get_class($currentClass);
    }

    return get_parent_class(get_parent_class($currentClass));
}

As you can see, the method actually returns us the instance of the grandparent class of Amit\Core\App\Item class which is the instance of Magento\Backend\Block\Widget\Grid\Extended which we intend to get eventually. And now we can use this instance instead of parent:: in above code.

namespace Amit\Core\App

class Item extends \Acme\Core\App\Item
{
    protected function prepareColumns()
    {
        // code commmented for brevity
        $grandparent = $this->get_grandparent_class($this);
        return $grandparent::_prepareColumns(); // This will work fine now.
    }

    /**
     * Get the grand parent class of the specified class
     *
     * @param $currentClass
     * @return string
    */
    private function get_grandparent_class($currentClass)
    {
        if (is_object($currentClass)) {
            $currentClass = get_class($currentClass);
        }

        return get_parent_class(get_parent_class($currentClass));
    }
}

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