Accessing a protected property of a post

Question

Fatal error: Cannot access protected property Some_Plugin::$_some_property

What is the best/least-destructive way of accessing a protected property attached to a post.

The property is being affixed to the post by a plugin but I need to access it's stored information to display.

The options I can think of are:

1. Altering the plug-in code. I'm not so familiar with Object Oriented PHP so I hesitate to do this to avoid damaging the functionality.
2. Somehow invoke the plug-in so I'm in the correct context to retrieve the information (possibly with function in functions.php)
3. Write a function which hooks to the publishing of this post type and duplicates the information to a new, non-protected property of the post.

Does anyone have any suggestions or code samples illustrating the best way to go about this. If you need more information just comment and I'll update the question.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The foolproof method here to grab a dynamic member variable is to use reflection!

Lets say we have this class:

class MyClass {
     private $myProperty = true;
}

We can use reflection to acquire the class, and the property:

$class = new ReflectionClass("MyClass");
$property = $class->getProperty("myProperty");

We can then set that property to accessible:

$property->setAccessible(true);

Now we can access the private member variable using the new $property object:

$obj = new MyClass();
echo $property->getValue($obj); // Works

Note, that the member variable is still private if we access it directly:

echo $obj->myProperty; // Error

However your code implies a static member variable, e.g.:

class Some_Plugin
    private static $_some_property;
}

Which this may not work for

Answer 2

Thank you @TomJNowell, I didn't end up using a reflection class but your answer had enough information regarding classes to get me on the right track. My steps were this.

I searched the plugin directory's php files for lines containing the property I wanted to use in my template.

grep --include=\*.php -rnw '/path/to/plugin' -e "_some_property"

I searched through the lines and eventually found the property being called kind of like this:

$property = Plugin_Registry::instance()->load_model('Someproperty' )->get_property( $post_id );

In my template file I then tested to see if I had access to the Plugin_Registry class.

class_exists(Plugin_Registry) // = 1

Then I was able to just copy that line directly into my template and have all the properties I was looking for.