php / phpDoc - @return instance of $this class?

Question

How do I mark a method as \"returns an instance of the current class\" in my phpDoc?

In the following example my IDE (Netbeans) will see that setSomething always returns

Answer 1

Thought I'd revisit this Q as I came across a couple of things.

Currently "return $this" isn't supported, but there is a PhpDoc request to add exactly that in v1.5:

http://pear.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=16223

There's also a request for it in Eclipse PDT:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=276082

Both are relatively old requests. I'm not going to get too excited about this being implemented any time soon, but here goes to hoping :) In the meantime, it seems there is no proper solution to this problem.