Switch statement in PHP - cleaner way to determine priority? I have a function that takes in a controller instance, a method, and parameters (this is for a little MVC experiment I'm working on). The purpose of the function is to execute the controller method with the given parameters.

However, there are a few caveats. First, if the controller has a "router" method, it will call that instead of the method that was passed in. Second, if any of the controller "annotations" return a response, that will also override the method. Then, if those cases fail, we return the response of the actual controller method passed in.

It looks like this:

    switch (true)
    {
        // Router methods get first priority!
        case ($controller-&gt;using_router):
            $response = call_user_func_array(array($controller, 'router'));
            break;

        // Annotation responses take precedence over method responses because they are often used for authentication.
        case ( ! is_null($response = Annotation\Runner::run(Annotation\Extractor::extract($controller, $method)))):
            break;

        // No router or annotation responses... we're ready to run the method!
        default:
            $response = call_user_func_array(array($controller, $method), $parameters);
    }


For some reason, this just feels dirty. I don't like the break after checking for an annotation response. But, I'm not sure of any other way to implement a response "priority".

Is there a better way?
That's certainly a bastardization of the switch statement.

What you should use is an if...else if... group:

$response = null; //initialize
if ( $controller-&gt;using_router)
{
  $response = $controller-&gt;router();
}
else
{
  $response = Annotation\Runner::run(Annotation\Extractor::extract( $controller, $method ) );
  if ( is_null( $response )
  {
    $response = call_user_func_array( array( $controller, $method ), $parameters );
  }
}


Note: this code flows in a readable manner. The response is set, if the controller is using the router, the response is set to the output of $controller-&gt;router(), otherwise the response is set to the extracted controller method.

If that is null, the response is finally set to whatever $controller-&gt;$method(...) produces.

Code should always flow in a readable manner (unless it's minified, obfuscated, or encoded).