I am making a tournament generator plugin in laravel: https://github.com/xoco70/kendo-tournaments

So basically,

- a championship can be made with team or with competitors
- a championship can have preliminary round
- a championship can be Direct Elimination or PlayOff

I initially did it in a single class TreeGen, but there were a lot of :

if ($championship->isDirectElimination) or if ($championship->hasPreliminary), etc... This can make a lot of case, and complexity increased too much. So, I refactored like this

SuperClass: TreeGen

This class has all common methods

Then 2 children class:

DirectEliminationTreeGen extends TreeGen

PlayOffTreeGen extends TreeGen

Then for each class, I created to children:

DirectEliminationTeamTreeGen extends TreeGen

DirectEliminationCompetitorTreeGen extends TreeGen

PlayOffTreeTeamGen extends TreeGen

PlayOffCompetitorTreeGen extends TreeGen

In each class, I only put method that vary.

This approach has for me several advantages :

• It break a single big class into smaller ones
• It removes conditions that make my code more and more difficult to maintain.

Now, my problem is in the case of DirectElimination with Team.

First, Before generating, I have a method chooseGenerationStrategy that determine the case:

public function chooseGenerationStrategy()
{
    $generation = new TreeGen($this, null);
    switch (true) {
        case $this->isDirectEliminationCompetitor():
            $generation = new DirectEliminationCompetitorTreeGen($this, null);
            break;
        case $this->isDirectEliminationTeam():
            $generation = new DirectEliminationTeamTreeGen($this, null);
            break;
        case $this->isPlayoffCompetitor():
            $generation = new PlayOffCompetitorTreeGen($this, null);
            break;
        case $this->isPlayoffTeam():
            $generation = new PlayOffTeamTreeGen($this, null);
            break;
    }
    return $generation;
}

Then I execute $generation->run()

It appears that in the execution, I have in TreeGen:

    $byeGroup = $this->getByeGroup($this->championship, $fighters);

so in this case, $this is DirectEliminationTeamTreeGen type, but getByeGroup in PlayOffTreeGenand DirectEliminationTreeGen

So my initial though was to create a getByeGroup inside the DirectEliminationTeamTreeGen and call the parent, but it was a bad work around, and also, I realize that method is defined in the parent of DirectEliminationTeamTreeGen class but in the child of the calling class `TreeGen``

I understand the issue, as there is no getByeGroup() method inside DirectEliminationTeamTreeGen class, but don't know how to fix it.

Any Idea?

You can call it this way.

class A{
    public function parentMethod() {
    }
}

class B extends A{
}

class C extends B{
    public function anotherMethod() {
        $this->parentMethod();
    }
}

If you want the method parentMethod() to be visible inside child class, the method has to be public (accessible from outside of the class) or protected (accessible only from inside - parent and child classes). private methods are only visible in the class in which they are defined.

More info here: PHP visibility.