Direct Property Access about dto

[johannesschobel]

Update:

My best so far, is to override the __get(...) method from your DTO like this:

public function __get($name)
{
    $field = parent::__get($name);
    $type = $field->getStorageType();

    $value = call_user_func([$field, 'to' . Str::ucfirst($type)]);

    return $value;
}

What do you think about this?

[fireproofsocks]

Sorry -- I just saw this (my Github notifications went AWOL). Oiy... no hacks like that should be required.
You can access object properties using arrow notation or using the "get" method. For example:

class GenericDTO extends \Dto\Dto
{
    protected $schema = [
        'type' => 'object',
        'properties' => [
            'additionalProperties' => true,
        ],
    ];
}

And then you may instantiate it as such:

$dto = new GenericDTO(['foo' => 'bar', 'some' => ['deep' => ['nested' => ['data']]]]);

You can retrieve an object attribute using arrow notation, or the get() method

print $dto->foo; // bar
print $dto->foo->toScalar(); // bar
print $dto->get('foo'); // bar

The trick is that each node in the DTO is also a DTO. PHP objects implicitly have a __toString method, so PHP will figure out how to handle something like $x = "The foo is " . $dto->foo; because from the context, it is clear that a string value is required. PHP doesn't have a __toInteger or __toBoolean etc. methods, so sometimes you need to really get the scalar value out of your DTO, so that's what the toScalar() method is for.

You can access the other attributes by name as well, but remember: you are always getting another DTO object in return.

So this returns a huge result with lots of recursion:

print_r($dto->some); // !!! big object with lots of recursion

But using the toArray() method gives you what you probably want:

Array
(
    [deep] => Array
        (
            [nested] => Array
                (
                    [0] => data
                )

        )

)

Similarly, toObject formats the output as an object (think of these as "views" since PHP is a bit ambiguous with its associative arrays and object syntax):

stdClass Object
(
    [deep] => stdClass Object
        (
            [nested] => stdClass Object
                (
                    [0] => data
                )

        )

)

Finally, you can access deeper items in your structure by using the arrow notation (for objects) and bracket notation for accessing elements from an array.

print $dto->some->deep->nested[0]; // prints "data"

Hope that makes things more clear. There are some examples on https://github.com/fireproofsocks/dto/wiki/GettingStarted to help get you started.