Question

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

// Loop through each personality that exists for the quiz
foreach($quiz_object->personalities AS $existing_personality)
{

    // Show all of the existing personalities
    echo $existing_personality->GetQuizMakerPersonalityHTML();
}

How do I “cast” (I think that’s the right word) my variable $existing_personality within the foreach loop as the object type?

I wish to do this so that when I type $existing_personality->, I get the list of public functions available for that object type.

UPDATE

At the moment, Zend Studio doesn’t know I am looping through an array of Personality objects within the loop, it just thinks it’s a standard variable. However, it is a type and my code works perfectly well. I just want the IDE hints on my variable within the foreach loop.

Just so that I’m clear, the hints appear for every other object, if I have:

$personality_object = new Personality();

// I get the IDE hints here
echo $personality_object->MyFunction();

But as soon as I start looping in a foreach, Zend has no way of knowing that I’m looping through an array of Objects.

This is how the array of personalities is defined initially within my Personality object:

class Personality
{

    // Array of Personality objects
    public $personalities = array();

}

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;

}