Creating a system where users can Private Message themselves

[programmer]

@TomB and others, am extending my forum app to allow users to pm themselves and using the patterns thought in your book(I don’t know the patterns used in your book), I created this

//Entity class
<?php
class Message{
	public $id;
    public $sender;
    public $receiver;
    public $content;
    public $sentDate;
    public $readDate;
    public $status;
    private $user;
    private $usersTable;

    public function __construct(DatabaseTable $usersTable){
    	$this->usersTable = $usersTable;
    }

    public function getSender(){
    	if(empty($user)){
    		$this->user = $this->usersTable->findById($this->sender);
    	}

    	return $this->user;
    }

    public function getReceiver(){
		if(empty($user)){
    		$this->user = $this->usersTable->findById($this->receiver);
    	}

    	return $this->user;
    }    	
}

And in the controller, created this method(function as PHP calls it). inside the Message controller

public function list(){

		$user = $this->authentication->getUser();
		$page = $_GET['page'] ?? 1;

		$offset = ($page-1)*10;

		$messages = $this->messagesTable->find('receiver', $user->id, 'sentDate DESC', 10, $offset);

		$title = 'Inbox messages';

		return [
			'template' => 'listmessages.html.php',
			'title' => $title,
			'variables' => [
				'messages' => $messages,
				'user' => $user
			]
		];
	}

Now, what am able to retrieve is only received messages alone which exclude the sent one. How then can I go about it to make it retrieve both the sent message and retrieve message.

[m_hutley]

While i’m not Tom nor did I generate his methodology, presumably $this->messagesTable->find returns an array.

@programmer

Now, what am able to retrieve is only received messages alone which exclude the sent one. How then can I go about it to make it retrieve both the sent message and retrieve message.

I’m not sure why you would want to do that, given that a user who has sent themselves a PM would have ‘received’ that message also. But lets assume you want to anyway.

Based on the formulation i can see here (and without knowing the definition of the find() function), I would assume that you can just
find('sender', $user->id, 'sentDate DESC', 10, $offset);
and then array_merge the two resultant arrays together. You may need to do some sorting as well to get them in proper order.