PHP OOP Question

^{* For the record, I agree that PHP isn't the best. Sucks, even.}

I have an OOP (object-oriented problem) and I'm wondering if either:
a) there's a solution
b) I'm worrying about nothing

I'm working on a ticketing system with MySQL. I have a child table that is one-to-one that represents ticket categories. I use it to resolve ticket category ids into English names.

I'm using my own sorta-ORM approach as I don't want to use a library. For Ticket objects, it made more sense to me to use a prepared PDO statement and execute it every time I instantiate, since it's lazy and the number of Tickets that will need to be instantiated changes depending on the page. Here's the class:

class TicketORM extends TicketBase
{
    private static $stmt_select;
   
    function __construct($id)
    {
        if(!isset(self::$stmt_select)) {
            $dbh = $this->getConnection();
            try {
                self::$stmt_select = $dbh->prepare(
                    'SELECT
                       ...
                    FROM
                        tickets
                        AS t
                    LEFT JOIN
                        ticket_categories
                        AS tc
                        ON t.category_id = tc.id
                    WHERE
                        t.id = ?');
                //...
            }
            catch (PDOException $e) {
                //...
            }
        }
       
        self::$stmt_select->execute( array($id) );
        $result = self::$stmt_select->fetch();
       
        $this->id = $id
        $this->created = strtotime($result['created']);
        //...
    }
    //...
}

However, with the simple category name resolution table, this approach seems like a lot of unnecessary overhead, when I could get all that shit with a simple SELECT * FROM ticket_categories.

So what's the problem?

Well, I want to take advantage of Type Hinting when I need to insert. I use a different class for creating new tickets:

class Ticket extends TicketBase
{
    private static $stmt_insert;
   
    function __construct($subject, TicketCategory $category, Client $client)
    {  
        $dbh = $this->getConnection();
        self::$stmt_insert = $dbh->prepare(/* ... */);
        $this->category =  //?!?!?!?
        //...
    }
    //...
}

I want to make sure that the value passed as $category is valid, in the most straightforward, db efficient, and Don't Repeat Yourself way I can.

What would you do, /prog/? Aside from reading SICP, of course.

(In my next post, I'll describe what I have at the moment, and some ideas.)

>>21
I have Something Gregory's textbook on game engine design - it's still currently in the Uncharted codebase.