How to deal with the method and its property?

Question

PHP

There is a large class in which the following method is described:

/**
   * Return the title of the page.
   *
   * @return  string
   *
   * @since    11.1
   */
  public function getDescription()
  {
    return $this->description;
  }

at the beginning of the class, as I understand it, the description property is described:

/**
   * Document description
   *
   * @var    string
   * @since  11.1
   */
  public $description = '';

The getDescription() method takes the first 200 characters of the article and writes them to the description meta tag. But the question is, how can I make the getDescription() method take more characters than 200? Help, please, in which direction to dig?

Answer 1

apparently the class works with the database and apparently the field type is varchar(200) :)

Answer 2

here is the class description the
property is set in the method

public function setDescription($description) {
  $this->description = $description;
}

this method is called in

public function setMetaData($name, $content, $http_equiv = false, $sync = true) {
  $name = strtolower($name);
  if ($name == 'generator') {
    $this->setGenerator($content);
  } elseif ($name == 'description') {
    $this->setDescription($content);
  } else {
    if ($http_equiv == true) {
      $this->_metaTags['http-equiv'][$name] = $content;
      // Syncing with HTTP-header
      if($sync && strtolower($name) == 'content-type') {
        $this->setMimeEncoding($content, false);
      }
    } else {
      $this->_metaTags['standard'][$name] = $content;
    }
  }
}

it remains to find where the
->setMetaData('description', .....) method is called

Answer 3

It depends on what you are doing. If you have a component, then just call

$doc = JFactory::getDocument();
$doc->setMetaData('description', 'This is my description');

Then there will be what you need. And if you hack joomla files then just don't update. Or you will lose everything during the update.