CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpeclipseintellisensecode-completiontype-hinting
Edward Tanguay
Edward Tanguay

Reputation: 193352

How can I get intellisense in PHP/Eclipse on custom objects pulled out of array in foreach loop?

I have a collection of custom objects (Podcast) in an array.

When I use a foreach loop to iterate through this collection, I don't have code completion on the variable that contains the object pulled out of the collection (as I would in C#/VisualStudio for instance).

Is there a way to give PHP a type hint so that Eclipse knows the type of the object being pulled out of the collection so it can show me the methods on that object in intellisense?

alt text

<?php

$podcasts = new Podcasts();
echo $podcasts->getListHtml();

class Podcasts {
    private $collection = array();

    function __construct() {
        $this->collection[] = new Podcast('This is the first one');
        $this->collection[] = new Podcast('This is the second one');
        $this->collection[] = new Podcast('This is the third one');
    }

    public function getListHtml() {
        $r = '';
        if(count($this->collection) > 0) {
            $r .= '<ul>';
            foreach($this->collection as $podcast) {
                $r .= '<li>' . $podcast->getTitle() . '</li>';
            }
            $r .= '</ul>';
        }       
        return $r;
    }
}

class Podcast {

    private $title;

    public function getTitle() { return $this->title; }
    public function setTitle($value) {  $this->title = $value;}

    function __construct($title) {
        $this->title = $title;
    }

}

?>

Addendum

Thanks, Fanis, I updated my FOREACH template to include that line automatically:

if(count(${lines}) > 0) {
    foreach(${lines} as ${line}) {
        /* @var $$${var} ${Type} */

    }
}

alt text

Upvotes: 10

Views: 3393

Answers (2)

santiago arizti
santiago arizti

Reputation: 4757

This might help some other people from the internet looking for a more succint solution to this problem.

My solution requieres PHP7 or higher. The idea is to map the array with an anonymous function and take advantage of type-hinting.

  $podcasts = getPodcasts();
  $listItems = array_map(function (Podcast $podcast) {
      return "<li>" . $podcast->getTitle() . "</li>";
  }, $podcasts);
  $podcastsHtml = "<ul>\n" . implode("\n", $listItems) . "\n</ul>";

In most cases a foreach can be converted into an array_map, it simply takes a little bit of paradigm shift towards functional programming.

If you use Laravel (I am sure other frameworks have Collections too) you could even chain these array maps with array filters and other functional stuff like this:

$html = "<ul>" . collect($podcasts)
  ->filter(function (Podcast $p) { return $p !== null; }) // filtering example
  ->map(function (Podcast $p) { return "<li>".$p->getTitle()."</li>"; }) // mapping
  ->implode("\n") . "</ul>";

In plain php chaining those array functions looks pretty uggly...

But there you go! a native way of type hinting your array iterations.

Upvotes: 0

Fanis Hatzidakis
Fanis Hatzidakis

Reputation: 5340

Yes, try:

foreach($this->collection as $podcast) {
    /* @var $podcast Podcast */
    $r .= '<li>' . $podcast->getTitle() . '</
}

It's been a while since I used Eclipse but I recall it used to work there too.

Upvotes: 19

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