Prepare for future with php-generic

According to this article which shows how to create strictly typed arrays and collections in Php7, php-generic generator was born.

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There is some discusion about generic in Php but who knows when it comes to us.

It is not exacly what you know from Java or C++ where generic looks like Vector<int>(), Array<bool>() or Vector<\Namespace\Entity\User>().

Here generics looks like VectorInt, ArrayBool and VectorUser so I hope when they come to nativ Php all what you need to do will be:

1. Replace all VectorType, ArrayType to Vector<Type>, array<Type>,
2. Delete directory where you store all generated array/vector,
3. Enjoy a nice day.

What generics are (not)

They are not collections like Doctrine or Laravel Collections. They are like normal php array which can store values one type. array<int> can store only numeric values which will converted to int so you can not push 'some string value' to it.

Install

$ composer require d0niek/php-generic

Generate generic array<Type>

There is a bin command that you should find in vendor/bin or somewhere else according to your composer.json settings.

To generate a generic array run:

$ bin/generic generate:array [-s|--save [SAVE]] [--] <type> <namespace>

where:

• -s|--saveCollection - do you want to save generated array for future regenerate (default true),
• type - is a type of generic array. It can be simple type (bool, int, float, string, array) or complex type (\YourApp\Module\Repository\User),
• namespace - is a namespace where new generic array will be save. Remember that namespace's directory have to exists. To separate namespace parts use \\ or / to speed up typing if your namespace is 1:1 with your directory structure

For example you have project in /path/to/project and your composer.json contains this kind of entry:

"autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
        "VendorName\\AppName\\": "src/"
    }
}

Now, when you call command like this:

$ bin/generic generate:array int VendorName\\AppName\\Collections

new generic array ArrayInt will be save to /path/to/project/src/Collections/ directory. If this directory does not exists, exceptions will be throw.

Tip! Store all php-generics in one diretory and add it to .gitignore. When php will start support generics, replace ArrayInt to array<int> and remove php-generic directory.

Generate generic Vector<Type>

You can alse generate generic \Ds\Vector (it is new data structure since Php7, here you can and you should read about it!). To do this just run:

$ bin/generic generate:vector [-s|--save [SAVE]] [--] <type> <namespace>

parameters means exacly the same whats means when you run generate:array.

Regenerate

By defaule generated array/vector are save in generated-colletions.json file in your root app path. Keep this file in repository and ignore all generated php-generics. When you clone repository, after composer install run:

$ bin/generic collections:regenerate

and all your collections will be regenerate.

Select data from DB

Now you can create in easy way specific generic when you are selecting data from DB

class UserRepository implements UserRepositoryInterface
{
    ...

    /**
     * @inheritDoc
     */
    public function findAll(): VectorUser
    {
        $users = new VectorUser();
        $mysqli = new \mysqli('localhost:3306', 'user', 'password', 'db');

        $mysqliResult = $mysqli->query('SELECT id, name FROM users LIMIT 10');
        if ($mysqliResult !== false) {
            while (($user = $mysqliResult->fetch_object(User::class)) !== null) {
                $users->push($user);
            }
        }

        $mysqli->close();

        return $users;
    }

    ...
}

Test

Before you run tests remember to regenerate collections. Run:

$ bin/generic collections:regenerate

and now you can run

$ phpunit