ClassHelper

This helper class is designed to be static analysis and refactoring-friendly when working with dynamic class names and composer autoloading.

Dynamic class names

When building class names dynamically, refactoring becomes difficult, and returning a specific class instance means you have to do a lot of instanceof calls, throwing exceptions if the object is not what you expected. The class has two methods for this:

Method requireObjectInstanceOf()

This method can be passed an object instance and the expected class name, and will throw an exception if the object is not an instance of this class. The return value is documented as returning an instance of that class for static analysis tools like PHPStan.

function getInstance() : ExpectedClassName
{
    $class = 'Example\Dynamically\Built\ClassName';

    return ClassHelper::requireObjectInstanceOf(
        ExpectedClassName::class,
        new $class()
    );
}

It is also designed to write more concise code, which is easy to read.

Method refactoring trick

Imagine having to reference an object method using a string: When renaming the method in the target class, the IDE will not know that this string must be updated too. Instead of using the method name without context, consider doing this:

// The IDE will recognise this as a callback, and will rename the method name automatically
$reference = array(ExampleClass::class, 'TargetMethodName');

// Store the method name
$methodName = $reference[1];

Composer class loader

In a Composer project, the method getClassLoader() will return an instance of Composer's ClassLoader class, for advanced functionality.