I'm writing a web application (PHP) for my friend and have decided to use my limited OOP training from Java.

My question is what is the best way to note in my class/application that specific critical things failed without actually breaking my page.

Currently my problem is I have an Object "SummerCamper" which takes a camper_id as it's argument to load all of the necessary data into the object from the database. Say someone specifies a camper_id in the querystring that does not exist, I pass it to my objects constructor and the load fails. Currently I don't see a way for me to just return false from the constructor.

I have read I could possibly do this with Exceptions, throwing an exception if no records are found in the database or if some sort of validation fails on input of the camper_id from the application etc.

However, I have not really found a great way to alert my program that the Object Load has failed. I tried returning false from within the CATCH but the Object still persists in my php page. I do understand I could put a variable $is_valid = false if the load fails and then check the Object using a get method but I think there may be better ways.

What is the best way of achieving the essential termination of an object if a load fails? Should I load data into the object from outside the constructor? Is there some osrt of design pattern that I should look into?

Any help would be appreciated.