Best way to design OO classes

[eluser]Teks[/eluser]
It is quite a common design pattern for Model-layer classes to have CRUD operations (= create/read/update/delete) that can be performed either on an individual record, or on a set.

In php, you can write methods that check to see whether the parameter that has been passed is either a single value - such as an 'id' - or an array of objects, and then perform the appropriate operation.

Code:

function delete($target){
  if (is_array($target)){
    //check that array contains appropriate data, then
    //do a loop through it, deleting every record included:
    [....]
  }
  else {
    //$target is a single entry, so check that
    // it is an 'id', then delete the appropriate record:
    [...]
  }
}