I'm just learning object-oriented design and am struggling to see how class inheritance can work in a form I'm doing in PHP. I'm making the search form for an alumni database (for internal use). You choose a graduation period to search a five or ten year interval, then you have radio buttons that allow you to search details about the alumnis' schooling, OR the details of their degree courses, OR what jobs they've had. There are multiple options to refine your search once you've chosen one of the radio buttons.
Some code is common to all searches. In every search, for example, you must first choose the graduation period. Other than that, the searches are quite different. All the searches are handled by one class at the moment (alumniSearch). It works fine, but is 1000 lines long!
I don't know how to split the class up into subclasses. How does inheritance work when you want to call a parent class first and have that direct to the right child class?
Would the answer be something like a simple controller script within alumniSearch (in pseudocode):
if (search_choice = "job search") {
include jobSearch.php;
} elseif (search_choice = "school search") {
include schoolSearch.php;
} ...
I've looked into abstract methods and interfaces but from what I understand the child class will have to define the abstract methods of its parent. The searches don't have the same methods, so they can't have this common template.
A controller would be an array with reference of the method and you would loop through the array and call the right method by reference.