Codeigniter - Custom result object method accessing to non-public properties...without setter? - codeigniter

Question

I just working on some project for my client, and probably I found some bug or missleading description in documentation.
I want to make a model, what is rerning results by custom classes, so I'm using custom_row_object method.
class UserModel extends CI_Model {
public function __construct(){
parent::__construct();
$this->load->library('Class_loader'); /custom spl loader
}
public function get_user_by_email($email, $password = null){
$this->db->where('email',$email);
$result = $this->db->get('User');
return $result->custom_row_object(0,'User');
}
}
and here is my class
class User {
private $idUser;
private $password;
private $email;
private $role;
public function __construct() {
echo 'instancja';
echo $this->password;
}
public function __set($name, $value) {
if ($name === 'password') {
$this->password = '****' // only for testing purposes :)
}
}
}
based on information here I understand that CI shouldn't have access to this properties directly, and should call a __set method.
But I'm so confused, because there is no any custom constructor, and my __set method should modify only a password property - but it won't, CI returns object with already setted properties directly from database! The only thing what I can do to modify them is adding a constructor and made changes in it like this
public function __construct(){
$this->password = '****';
}
So the question is - how it's possible? Is CI uses some reflection mechanism, or am I too stupid and I understood docs wrong ? :/

Answer 1

You can find the answer in the underlying Driver.
You probably use mysql as database and pdo / mysqli as a driver.
In both cases - Codeigniter uses the fetchObject (PDO) or fetch_object (MySQLi) methods.
You can find this lines of code for PDO here and for MySQLi here on the official Codeigniter Github Repository.
If you take a look on the documentation now - it cleary states
PDO:
When an object is fetched, its properties are assigned from respective column values, and afterwards its constructor is invoked.
MySQLi:
The mysqli_fetch_object() will return the current row result set as an object where the attributes of the object represent the names of the fields found within the result set.
Note that mysqli_fetch_object() sets the properties of the object before calling the object constructor.
Source - PHP Documentation:
PDOStatement::fetchObject
mysqli_result::fetch_object