According to Standards Recommendations How many properties are allowed in class

Question

Here some example of code

class A {
    public $attribute1;
    public $attribute2;
    public $attribute3;
    ........
    public $attributeN;
}

I need to know how many properties I can have in the class. What say about this PSR or phpmd or something else standard?

With bud example I can have "how many I want", but I need to write it with PSR and phpmd. I am searching this but still can not find.

Thanks for help.

Answer 1

If you plan to have attributes in such way, you definitely do it wrong.

public $attribute1;
public $attribute2;
public $attribute3;
........
public $attributeN;

You probably need several arrays, with all that values.

Answer 2

Like arkascha said, there is no technical limit for this. Classes are implemented using hash tables and access to its properties (or fields) is designed to work efficiently at constant time for millions of properties. See this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table

PHPMD is a tool for analyzing source code. The rules described in its Rules page including its Code Size Rules are just its default configuration. In other words, you can modify it to whatever you want to match your own policy.

For example, if a company has a policy that the maximum number of fields should be 100, look for the "TooManyFields" rule and modify it like this:

<properties>
    <property name="maxfields" description="The field count reporting threshold " value="100"/>
</properties>

Another company can modify the maximum limit to 50 thousand fields, like this:

<properties>
    <property name="maxfields" description="The field count reporting threshold " value="50000"/>
</properties>

You can even create your own rules.

In conclusion, the rules described there are not for everyone to follow. They are just default configuration. Any company and any development team can modify the configuration to match their own policies.