What is the best way to manage a class with lots of properties?

Question

We have one table meta where there is key and value so each of the row represents one component or service and then we have api system which manages the metas database. And it was going pretty well when we had 10 rows = 10 properties now it grew to be 30 and its so annoying i am using php and lets say it looks like

Class metas {
private $metas1=[]
private $metas2=[]
private $metas3=[]
}

Now i think the best way to manage this class is to put these keys on yml file but is it the best way?

Answer 1

Whenever you start numbering your properties, such as:

private int myField1;
private int myField2;
private int myField3;

What you're really doing here is trying to hardcode a list, and you should be using a collection type instead (whether an array, list, or any other collection type is contextual and language dependent):

private int[] myFields;

This example uses int as the base type, but that is not the case for you.

I suspect this is PHP (due to the $)? Your example is a bit light on the specific ypes being used, and I'm no PHP dev, but it seems to me that your individual fields are already some sort of collection type (due to the []), so the type of your "list of fields" property will be something along the line of an array of arrays, also known as a multi-dimensional array

The example code on the page I linked seems to match your goal of a key/value dictionary:

$cars = array (
  array("Volvo",22,18),
  array("BMW",15,13),
  array("Saab",5,2),
  array("Land Rover",17,15)
);