Docblocks for Doctrine collections

Question

Is there a standard way to document the expected class of entities inside a Collection in the docblock comment in a Doctrine project? Something like:

/**
 * @var Collection<User>
 */
protected $users;

Looks like PHPDoc is the de-facto standard for docblock annotations now, but I couldn't find any mention for this use case.

Answer 1

Here is a solution that enables you to have autocompletion both on the Collection methods and your objects methods:

/**
 * @param Collection|User[] $users
 */
public function foo($users)
{
    $users-> // autocompletion on Collection methods works

    foreach ($users as $user) {
        $user-> // autocompletion on User methods work
    }
}

It works like a charm in PhpStorm at least.

Answer 2

I think User[] should work. Don't remember where I found that.

Answer 3

There are a few different ways to document expected variables. Have a look at the phpDoc documentation for a full list of available tags.

class MyClass
{
    /**
     * Users collection
     * @var \Doctrine\ORM\ArrayCollection
     */
    protected $users;

    /**
     * My method that doesn't do much
     * @param \Doctrine\ORM\ArrayCollection $users
     * @return void
     */
    public function myMethod(\Doctrine\ORM\ArrayCollection $users)
    {
        /** @var \Entities\Users $user */
        $user = current($this->users);
    }
}