“Mr Dizzy was to be quite honest, not very clever.”

One day, while refactoring a web application from procedural to object oriented code, Mr Dizzy decided to use constructors in a way that anyone in Cleverland would have pointed out was really not very clever.

While Mr Dizzy was building his user class he decided that it would be useful to have getPermissions() and getOrganisations() methods. These methods needed to make a query or more to the database to get the information they needed.

Mr Dizzy thought it might be a good idea to have the setters for these methods in a constructor so that when he needed a User object it would have gathered all the necessary information and was ready to go, so, he added setPermissions() and setOrganisations() methods.

“Great”, thought Mr Dizzy, and he proceeded to use his new user object. His idea seemed to be working well so he decided to use the same idea in his Organisation class so it could also get its own permissions on call. “Even better”, thought Mr Dizzy, “I can’t wait to show this to the other programmers in Cleverland”.

Before taking a trip to Cleverland, Mr Dizzy decided to finish off some code to allow him to show a list of users. This list included using many instances of his newly built user class.

Can you guess what happened?

Of course, every time a new user object was created so too was a new organisation object and so too was a new permissions object and all of these objects made database queries. Before long hundreds of queries had been made to the database, all hidden away nicely in constructors.

Luckily for Mr Dizzy he had done his usual trick of missing the last bus to Cleverland and had also recently installed the Zend_Db_Profiler which showed just how silly he had been before anyone else could see.

From that day on Mr Dizzy knew to be very careful when deciding what to do within constructors.

Obvious, but necessary disclaimer

Surprised as you may be, Roger Hargreaves, the original author of the excellent Mr Men series of children’s books, did not in fact author any of the above. Nor, unfortunately, was it narrated by Arthur Lowe, but I’d recommend that if you know his voice then you imagine him doing so.

Mr Dizzy is obviously copyright and I probably shouldn’t be messing with the classics, so if there are any copyright objections then I’m happy to alter this tribute. I do recommend that even if you don’t have kids you should own at least one Mr Men or Little Miss book if only for the great graphics!

Finally, I, of course, would never do something as silly as Mr Dizzy!