| inheritance, fluent interfaces, and code completion [message #87247] |
Fri, 19 December 2008 08:26  |
Eclipse User |
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Hi.
I have an abstract base class called Article. It has a mutator like this:
/**
* Set the Title of the Article
*
* @param string $title
* @return Article
*/
public function setTitle($title = null)
{
if (! is_string($title))
throw new Exception('Invalid title');
$this->title = $title;
return $this;
}
I have a concrete sub class called News Article. It has a mutator like
this:
/**
* Sets the Role that is permitted to view this article
*
* @param string $role
* @return NewsArticle
*/
public function setRole($role = null)
{
if (! is_string($role))
throw new Exception(sprintf("Invalid role: '%s'", $role));
$this->role = $role;
return $this;
}
This fluent interface allows me to write code like this:
$article = new NewsArticle();
$article
->setRole('public')
->setTitle('Foo Bar');
PDT gives me nice code completion for this.
However, code completion breaks when I use methods from the abstract class
(even though the code works just fine):
$article
->setTitle('Foo Bar')
->setRole('public'); // no code completion here
I guess this is because setTitle has @return Article in the doc block.
I could change it to @return Article|NewsArticle, but this feels wrong,
since the base class shouldn't know anything about classes that derive from
it.
Is there a better way to do it?
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| Re: inheritance, fluent interfaces, and code completion [message #87516 is a reply to message #87325] |
Mon, 22 December 2008 19:20  |
| Eclipse User |
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Michael Spector wrote:
> Is setRole() declared as abstract method in your Article class ?
No. I (will) have other classes that are derived from Article that won't
have this functionality, so I don't want it in the base class.
I think the only way I could get the code completion working would be to
override setTitle() in NewsArticle:
/**
* Set the Title of the Article
*
* @param string $title
* @return NewsArticle
*/
public function setTitle($title = null)
{
parent::setTitle($title);
}
That'd get old pretty fast, though.
I'm actually starting to wonder if the inheritance would work at all in a
more strongly typed language. I don't think Java, for example, would let
me get away with the following:
NewsArticle newsArticle = new Article();
I might need to have a rethink this one. Maybe it's fluent OR
inheritance, but not both.
Thanks for your input.
G.
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