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Updating Type Hints for Dictionaries in PHP SDKs

· 2 min read

APIMatic CodeGen has made improvements by updating type hints of dictionaries in PHP SDKs to better capture the type information.

Details​

Previously, PHP SDKs were using the type array for a dictionary of any type. For example, following is a model named TeamMembersRequest with a field teamMembers of type Dictionary<string,TeamMember>. In PHP, this model would look like:

class TeamMembersRequest
{
    /**
     * @var array
     */
    private $teamMembers;
}

Using array not only loses the dictionary's inner type information but also affects the users Developer Experience. Likewise in PHP, type array means a dictionary of mixed types, which leads to type hint array in PhpStrom IDE, as shown:

PHP Image IDE

What has Changed?​

To improve the code readability, correctness and to preserve the inner type of a dictionary in PHP, APIMatic now uses the Phan analyzer's approach of dealing with maps. Therefore, the above-mentioned snippet of a model class TeamMembersRequest would now look like:

class TeamMembersRequest
{
    /**
     * @var array<string,TeamMember>
     */
    private $teamMembers;
}

This code leads to TeamMember[] type hint in PhpStorm IDE which is equivalent to a PHP map of TeamMember. These type hints are later used by JsonMapper to deserialize a JSON string into the model and the suppport for map of type A i.e. array<string,A> with the release of JsonMapper.

PHP Image 2