13-php-di-4-4-released.md

layout	title	author	date
blogpost	PHP-DI 4.4 released	Matthieu Napoli	October 12th 2014

I am happy to announce that PHP-DI version 4.4 has been released. This version contains mainly improvements to the Container::call() feature, and contains no BC-break.

Container::call()

Container::call() was introduced in v4.2 and lets you invoke a callable while letting PHP-DI resolve its parameters:

$container->call(function (LoggerInterface $logger) {
    $logger->info('Hello world!');
});

In the example above, PHP-DI would resolve the $logger dependency using the LoggerInterface type-hint and then invoke the closure.

Support for all types of callables

Container::call() works great with closures, but it wasn't completely supporting all the different kinds of callables.

PHP-DI 4.4 brings support for every callable type:

• closures
• PHP functions: 'someFunction' would call someFunction(…)
• object method: [$object, 'method'] would call $object->method(…)
• static class method: ['MyClass', 'method'] would call MyClass::method(…)
• invokable object: $object would call $object(…)

Invokable objects are objects implementing the __invoke() magic method. They can be called directly:

class MyClass {
    public function __invoke() {
        ...
    }
}

$object = new MyClass;
$object();

A good example to show how good these improvements are is with the example of a micro-framework:

$controller = /* get from the router */;

$container->call($controller, $_GET + $_POST);

This lets you write your controllers as PHP callables. That means you can use functions, closures, object methods or even invokable objects as controllers.

Auto-creation of callable objects

PHP-DI 4.3 introduced the possibility for auto-creating objects in Container::call():

class MyClass {
    public function method() {
        ...
    }
}

$container->call(['MyClass', 'method']);

If method() is not a static method, then MyClass will be resolved from the container (a new instance will be created automatically). This results in the equivalent code:

(new MyClass)->method();

With PHP-DI 4.4, you can now use the same feature for invokable objects:

class MyClass {
    public function __invoke() {
        ...
    }
}

$container->call('MyClass');

The example above is equivalent to:

$object = new MyClass;
$object();

If we take the "micro-framework" example again, we can turn this:

class HomeController {
    public function __invoke($name) {
        echo 'Hello ' . $name;
    }
}

$controller = $container->make('HomeController');
$container->call($controller, $_GET + $_POST);

Into this:

$container->call('HomeController', $_GET + $_POST);

Neat!

If you want to learn more, read the Using the Container documentation.

Silently ignore phpDoc errors

If you use annotations, PHP-DI reads the phpDoc to guess property and parameter types.

If a dockblock contains non-existent classes like this:

/**
 * @param type $param
 */
public function __construct($param)
{
    // ...
}

Then PHP-DI will throw an exception.

Thanks to @kdubois, you now have an option to silently ignore those errors as long as they do not prevent resolving objects:

$containerBuilder->ignorePhpDocErrors(true);

Read more about this in the Container configuration documentation.

Change log

You can read the complete change log.