How to get rid of this cyclic dependence?

Question

I am currently writing several classes for working with localization in a PHP web application.

Classes:

• Locale - works with settings and gets user language, time zone, language.
• LocaleFormat - works with formatting dates, comparisons, currency formats, etc.
• Time Zone - Deal with a list of time zones for countries and other time zone related functions.
• LocaleData - Retrieves locale data, such as address formats and things like regular expressions of a postal code.

The whole application works correctly, but I need to add a few more things to Timezone.

This leads to this problem: Locale requires Timezone methods, which require LocaleData methods, which require Locale methods.

How can I break this cyclic dependency? Should I break my classes into smaller pieces? Are there any patterns to solve this problem?

Greetings :)

Answer 1

If you only call methods from other classes, first load all classes, then you can call methods between classes. Do not initialize inside class files, which must be executed in a separate “bootloader” file, which “includes” the files and then calls initialization.

If you get circular dependencies based on classes extending other classes, you need to rethink the whole setup.