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Creating a strictly typed collection of objects in PHP

30 Aug 2019

Table of contents

Intro

Generics are still a long way off and whether they’ll ever come like that is questionable.

Did you know that we actually do not need generics, because PHP 7.4+ has everything to implement type-safe and future-proof collection classes.

We only need the features everyone should know since PHP 7: Classes, arrays and type declarations.

Type declarations were also known as “type hints” in PHP 5. With type declarations, methods can require that parameters be of a certain type at the time of the invocation. If the specified value is of the wrong type, an error occurred.

Creating a data object

First, we create a data object to store our data in-memory:

<?php

final class User
{
    /**
     * @var int
     */
    public int $id;

    /**
     * @var string
     */
    public string $username;
}

Note: Typed class properties have been added in PHP 7.4 and provide a major improvement to PHP’s type system.

Creating a collection class

Now we create a collection class to collect and retrieve our “array” of user objects.

Example:

final class UserList
{
    /**
     * @var User[] The users
     */
    private $users = [];

    /**
     * Add user to list.
     *
     * @param User $user The user
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function addUser(User $user): void
    {
        $this->users[] = $user;
    }

    /**
     * Get all users.
     *
     * @return User[] The users
     */
    public function all(): array
    {
        return $this->users;
    }
}

Usage

Let’s just create a new (and empty) collection object:

$users = new UserList();

Then we add some new User objects to the collection:

$user = new User();
$user->id = 1;
$user->username = 'admin';

$users->addUser($user);

$user = new User();
$user->id = 2;
$user->username = 'operator';

$users->addUser($user);

Now we can iterate over the collection with the method $users->all():

foreach ($users->all() as $user) {
    echo sprintf("ID: %s, Username: %s\n", $user->id, $user->username);
}

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