Annonate fields created in a stdClass?

Question

class Foo
{
    public function bar(): \stdClass
    {
        $obj = new \stdClass;
        $obj->test = 'test';
        return $obj;
    }
}

When doing $foo = new Foo;, is it possible to annotate Phpdoc so that the IDE can autocomplete to $foo->bar()->test?

Answer 1

I'm sorry, there's currently no way to document associative arrays or stdClass objects in phpDocumentor or custom annotations formats understood by NetBeans.

From a design perspective, perhaps it could make sense to use proper classes:

class Bar
{
    /**
     * @var string
     */
    public $test;
}

class Foo
{
    public function bar(): Bar
    {
        $obj = new Bar;
        $obj->test = 'test';
        return $obj;
    }
}

If you need no logic at all, the classes can be empty:

/**
 * @property string $test
 */
class Bar
{
}

Otherwise, you can always trick the IDE with a stub file that defines a fake class but is never actually executed and then pretend that your variable belongs to that class:

$foo = new Foo;
/* @var $bar Bar *//** @var Bar $bar */
$bar = $foo->bar();
$bar->…

… where /* @var $bar Bar */ is for NetBeans 8 and earlier and /** @var Bar $bar */ for NetBeans 10 (and many other IDEs).