Dynamically declared fields in Kohana

Question

I’ve been building an application with Kohana 3.3, and recently switched development from Coda 2 — a text editor — to PhpStorm 6 — an IDE.

PhpStorm 6 has been very handy in pointing out potential code smells; it prompted me to move from attaching data to views with the __set($key, $value) magic method to instead using the bind($key, $value) method.

Another thing that PhpStorm 6 is complaining about, is that I’m declaring fields dynamically.

I have subclassed Controller_Template, and I’m attaching my view to my template like this:

public function action_index() {
    # Create the view
    $view = View::factory('project/list');

    # Attach the view to the template
    $this->template->content = $view;
}

Apparently, content is declared dynamically. I’ve been checking up the class heirarchy, and I can't find the content property declared anywhere (hence why it’s dynamic, I suppose). Is this a code smell? Is dynamic declaration bad? Can I explicitly declare the content property somewhere?

As it is, the code works. I just want to understand why PhpStorm is giving me a notice, and whether or not I’m going about things the right way.

Answer 1

The advantage and disadvantage of PHP is dynamic typing. Its convenient in some cases, but irritating in another. You shown here irritating example. You know, that the $view is object which inherit from View (for example), so you know which functions you can use. If you don't mess anything, there will be View type object always.

Phpstorm don't have this information and thats why you see warning. He wants you also to be careful with this code but in this case you cannot do nothing. You cannot also cast $view to View like in Java:

$this->template->content = (View)$view; //impossible :(

$view and $this->template->content are dynamic typing variables and you cannot change it. Just take care to not assign another type to your variable and everything should work fine.