How to get intellisense working with phpStorm when passing object to function or iterating

Question

I have an object with getters and setters but I'm loosing intellisense on that object when I pass it to a function or while iterating through a array of these objects.

For example:

...
$personA = new Person(..);
$age = $personA->getAge();  // intellisense works.

$personArray = array($personA, $personB, .. );
foreach($personArray as $aPerson){
   $aPerson->getAge();   //  no intellisense here
}

doSomething($personA); 



function doSomething($person){
   $person->getAge()         //  no intellisense here
   ...
}

What am I missing here?

Do I need to make a change to code(casting.. etc), Missing a phpStorm setting? Maybe it's not possible?

Answer 1

For the first foreach case it is not (yet) possible out of the box, however you can typically hint that:

$personArray = array($personA, $personB, .. );
foreach ($personArray as $aPerson) {
   /* @var $aPerson Person */
   $aPerson->getAge();  // now with code-completition
}

Which is doing the type-hinting on the variable that is taking the iteration. Alternatively you can also do the type-hinting on the array variable:

/* @var $personArray Person[] */
$personArray = array($personA, $personB, .. );
foreach ($personArray as $aPerson) {
    $aPerson->getAge();  // now with code-completition
}

For your second case, you can add PHP type-hinting (which I recommend):

function doSomething(Person $person) {
   $person->getAge() //  now with code-completition
   ...
}

This also ensures that you can only pass values that are of that type. See as well Type Hinting ^Docs and Interfaces ^Docs.

The other solution for the second case is to also document the parameter in the docblock of the function:

/**
 * @param Person $person
 */
function doSomething($person) {
   $person->getAge() //  now with code-completition
   ...
}

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