Adding more built-in casters

[mauriciovillam]

Hello,

I'm currently moving my project from spatie/data-transfer-object to spatie/laravel-data. I noticed that this project includes a cast by default (DateTimeInterface), wouldn't it be a good idea to implement spatie/data-transfer-object's ArrayCaster and the equivalent of DataTransferObjectCaster?

Thanks.

[rubenvanassche]

Hi @mauriciovillam,

In case of the DataTransferObjectCaster this automatically already happens, if you nest a Data object into another and provide an array with the correct data for that nested data object it will be automatically created. (You can read more about it here: https://spatie.be/docs/laravel-data/v1/as-a-data-transfer-object/nesting)

For the ArrayCaster, the same thing happens when you have a DataCollection annotated with the data class, then an array of arrays that could be casted into data objects will be automatically casted. (More information here: https://spatie.be/docs/laravel-data/v1/as-a-data-transfer-object/collections)

[mauriciovillam]

@rubenvanassche

Looks good, however, one of the use cases I had for ArrayCaster is setting the default value to an empty array [] to optional promoted properties in the constructor. I'm not sure if this is within the scope of the package but currently I can't do this without adding some boilerplate. This means, I can't do this (I know it's obvious why I can't do it but just to show what I'm trying to convey):

public function __construct(
        /** @var Step[] */
        public DataCollection $steps = []
) { }

Edit nov. 8: This issue may be resolved in PHP 8.1 due to being able to use new in initializers. (https://stitcher.io/blog/php-81-new-in-initializers)

On the other hand, DataCollection with annotated Data models in the same namespace are not resolved correctly. I'm getting this error:

Data collection property `steps` in `Data\Models\Plan` has an annotation that isn't a data object

$steps is instantiated like this in the constructor:

/** @var Step[] */
public DataCollection $steps,

If I change it to this it works:

/** @var \Data\Models\Step[] */
public DataCollection $steps,

The problem seems to occur in https://github.com/spatie/laravel-data/tree/main/src/Support/DataProperty.php:151. I see that this problem has already been foreseen with a TODO comment. We are probably re-inventing the wheel there and need to delegate the class' namespace resolver logic to an utility class/library. You can see a similar discussion here: php-annotations/php-annotations#15.

[rubenvanassche]

Hi @mauriciovillam,

The problem should be solved by using version 1.1.0 of the package, it now has built in support for classes without FQN's 🎉

As for the initializer problem, yeah PHP 8.1 is only two weeks away from us, I think that would be the best solution to tackle this issue.