Generating parameter, property & return types from phpdoc

[acoulton]

Hey,

Thanks for the brilliant tool! As part of a bunch of refactoring, I was hoping to convert phpdoc tags into actual types - for example:

class A {
   /**
     * @var string
     */
   private $foo;

   /**
     * @param string $baz
     * @return bool
     */
   public function bar($baz) {  }
}

into:

class A {
   private string $foo;

   public function bar(string $baz): bool {   }
}

However I'm struggling to find rules / sets that do this - the typeDeclarations set doesn't seem to.

Just wondering if I'm missing something or if that's not currently implemented?

[TomasVotruba]

Hey, thanks for good question.

We've supported such conversion in the past, but it was breaking many codebases. Scalar docblock cannot be trusted, as it can contain anything. That's why we only support strict type declarations.

See:
https://getrector.com/blog/new-in-rector-015-complete-safe-and-known-type-declarations#content-known-and-safe-types-first-only

[acoulton]

@TomasVotruba thanks for the quick reply.

I realise it could be extremely risky to do this blindly, and not something you'd want to do by default / without a very clear opt-in.

That said, my current usecase is creating new major versions of some of our libraries where the phpdoc is pretty reliable as to what should be accepted/returned and we now want to be strict about that (as a potentially-breaking release).

So whatever happens I need to start with the risky step of defining concrete types based on the phpdoc - I was just hoping to automate that so I could focus my time on then reviewing & fixing any issues that arise. There isn't enough concrete type information within the library source / usage for Rector to find / apply many of them with the current strict typing rules.

But I understand you want to make sure the tool is safe / reliable out of the box.

Would you consider reintroducing these rules as an opt-in if they were clearly labelled and standalone? If so I could submit a PR?

[samsonasik]

@acoulton I think you can create your own custom rule(s) for it :)

[acoulton]

@samsonasik I can indeed - was just thinking it could be useful to others as well.

Totally understand if you don't want it back in core, if so then I'll maybe look at publishing custom rules as a package so they're reusable (I already have a few different projects I'd want to use them with).

[acoulton]

Just for anyone who finds this question in future, I've created and published https://github.com/ingenerator/risky-rector-rules with rules for adding strict types from @var, @param, and @return tags. It's worked well for my usecase so far.

[TomasVotruba]

Epic work, thanks for sharing!

If you tweet it, mark @rectorphp and we can give it some attention 👍

[acoulton]

Done!