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This question already has an answer here:

Not sure exactly how to phrase the question succinctly for the title.

I have a collection class that extends another collection class.

The parent collection-class has a method addMember(someClass $obj) that adds an object to the collection.

The child collection-class groups objects of the child class of someclass, someClassChild. I thought that a child class's method's signature would pass muster as long as the signature was the same or required children of the classes the parent required.

E.g. addMember(someClassChild $obj)

But I tried it and I'm getting a warning about strict standards.

So then, how to I implement a collection class as a child of another collection class to provide functionality for parent/child base objects?

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marked as duplicate by World Engineer♦ Feb 24 at 23:09

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.
    
possible duplicate of "Illegal in PHP: Is there an OOP design reason?", "Liskov principle: violation by type-hinting" –  outis Feb 24 at 22:44

2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote

It's a violation of Liskov's substitution principle. Basically any class that uses SomeClass must be able to rely on the fact that addMember accepts a SomeClass or any of its subclasses. In your example, that's no longer true, because now you have an implementation of SomeClass that will cause a fatal error whenever a SomeClass object is passed that is not a SomeClassChild.

Some languages allow contravariance of method arguments, meaning that a subclass may accept a more general type (rather than more specific like in your example), which makes sense, because any SomeClass is also a SomeSuperClass if SomeClass extends SomeSuperClass. PHP however doesn't support this.

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up vote 1 down vote

The principle you're looking for is covariance and contravariance in type hints. To my knowledge, PHP doesn't support it.

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I guess you're right. I was able to work around that by changing the signature to match the parent, and then adding a bit where it uses if((!$obj instanceof someClassChild) ) return false –  Buttle Butkus Feb 23 at 8:01

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