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);
    }