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

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.

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.

$ composer require d0niek/php-generic

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.

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.

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.

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;
    }

    ...
}

Before you run tests remember to regenerate collections. Run:

$ bin/generic collections:regenerate

and now you can run

$ phpunit