Advice: handling dynamically created instance var values

[far-blue]

I'm updating some existing code to allow it to be checked with Phan and I have a template engine which allows you to set (using magic methods) values on, effectively, dynamically created instance vars. e.g.

$view = new View();
$view->foo = 1;
$view->baa = 'hello';

Where foo and baa are then used in the template and are not pre-defined anywhere.

Is there a way to effectively tell Phan about this kind of behaviour on a class?

Thanks!

[TysonAndre]

#805 would need to be done first.

After it was completed, it might be possible to write a plugin to type check the inner body of the template.

[far-blue]

I'm not really bothered about the type safety of the values passed to the template engine because the templates themselves aren't php, I'd just prefer not to have (lots of!) warnings about references to undeclared properties on this one particular class which is the 'view' class.

[TysonAndre]

// @phan-file-suppress PhanUndeclaredProperty might work.

You can also write your own plugin to just suppress undeclared property issues for the given issues.

Resources:

• https://github.com/phan/phan/blob/master/src/Phan/Plugin/Internal/BuiltinSuppressionPlugin.php is what implements @phan-file-suppress
• https://github.com/phan/phan/wiki/Writing-Plugins-for-Phan

An alternative would be to add a way to specify that user-defined classes have arbitrary dynamic properties and to give up on warning about them (Phan does this if __get or __set are defined, but that probably doesn't help you)

[far-blue]

Interestingly, my view class inherits from a parent that does have __set defined. I guess Phan doesn't notice this inheritance maybe?

[TysonAndre]

It's been a while since I've looked at the magic property code.

It turns out that \Phan\Language\Element\Clazz->getPropertyByNameInContext() only checks for __get() (unconditionally). There was a TODO for that.

• Defining only __set and not __get is a fairly rare case. It should work properly if __set is defined.

Checking if the parent node was an assignment (to determine if __get()/__set() should be checked for) would be the proper way to do this check

[far-blue]

thanks for your reply :) Adding a __get method did the job :)

[TysonAndre]

Closing this and opening #1756 to track the code fixes I mentioned