PHP Casting Variable as Object type in foreach Loop

Question

Within the following code, $quiz_object->personalities contains an array of Personality objects.

// Loop through each personality th         


        

Answer 1

It much depends on the IDE you are using.

In Netbeans and IntelliJ you are able to use @var in a comment:

/* @var $variable ClassName */
$variable->

The IDE will now know that $variable is of the class ClassName and hint after the ->.

You can try it out in your own IDE as well.

You can also create a @return annotation in a getPersonalities() method stating that the return will be a ClassName[], which means an array of ClassName objects:

/**
 * Returns a list of Personality objects
 * @return Personality[]
 */
function getPersonalities() {
    return $this->personalities;
}

this also depends on how your IDE is interpreting this type of hinting.

To use this in foreach loops you can do 1:

/* @var $existing_personality Personality */
foreach( $quiz_object->personalities as $existing_personality ){
}

or 2:

foreach( $quiz_object->getPersonalities() as $existing_personality ){
}

both should enable IDE hinting, if your IDE is kind enough.

As an extra note, if you want to use this inside it's own class, you can use the same signature when declaring a class variable:

class MyClass
{ 

    /** 
    * @var ClassName[] $variable List of ClassName objects. 
    */ 
    var $variable;

}