Best practice way to detect Optional

[Floppy012]

I'm having a DTO and need to perform an action on a DataCollection that can be optional.

Currently I check for Optional using instanceof like this:

if (!($dto->collection instanceof Optional)) {
    // Do something
}

it kind of feels wrong to do it like this. Is there any better way to do this?

[rubenvanassche]

I think this is the best way to do this 😄

[ejunker]

@rubenvanassche what do you think about adding a has() method so you could do something like this:

if ($dto->has('collection')) {
  // Do something
}

This is useful when you are using Data objects created from a Request and you are doing a partial field update. This is similar to has() method in Illuminate\Http\Request

[ejunker]

Maybe it would look something like this:

    public function has(string $propertyName): bool
    {
        return isset($this->{$propertyName}) && ! ($this->{$propertyName} instanceof Optional);
    }

[onlime]

Thanks @ejunker for your solution. Still missing this in current Laravel-data. It just does not feel "clean" to use Optional object anywhere outside of the data objects.

My current trait looks like this:

namespace App\Traits;

use Spatie\LaravelData\Data;
use Spatie\LaravelData\Optional;

/** @mixin Data */
trait HasDataAccessHelpers
{
    public function has(string $propertyName): bool
    {
        return isset($this->{$propertyName}) && ! ($this->{$propertyName} instanceof Optional);
    }

    public function get(string $propertyName, mixed $default = null): mixed
    {
        return $this->has($propertyName) ? $this->{$propertyName} : $default;
    }
}

Should we PR such helper methods or did you find a better way of handling this in the meantime? I'd prefer using isset(), overriding it with the __isset() in the data objects, but that would be quite obtrusive.