Tinkerwell 4 is out now! See what's new or buy now.
Tinkerwell background image
Tinkerwell Logo Tinkerwell
Go back to Blog

Enabling autocompletion for unrecognized classes

Tinkerwell supports fantastic autocompletion for many classes out of the box and if you use it on Laravel helpers or initialize classes directly, there is no need for additional steps to make it work.

But sometimes Tinkerwell can't detect which class you are using in your code and does not provide the autocompletion experience that you love. In this case, it makes sense to manually add a type-hinting comment to that line and enable autocompletion.

So if you use Tinkerwell with Laravel and simply load a user from the database via Eloquent, autocompletion might not work directly.

That's a common problem with most IDEs and the magic of the framework – but luckily, you can enable autocompletion via a type hinting comment. Simply add the reference to the class as a comment and autocompletion works again.

That's not only helpful when working with Eloquent models but also in scenarios where return types of methods aren't that clear and you can't remember all methods but also don't want to open the class in your IDE to look them up. So adding a type hint solves a common problem when tinkering with your code on production environments where you can't easily open the files to see which methods are available on an object.

Jess Archer, Laravel Core team member
“Tinkerwell is the fastest way to test an idea or debug an application. It just keeps getting better and better!”

Jess Archer

Laravel Core team member

Rishab Kapadia, Developer
“It's a horror to even think working without it. The defacto standard to test code logic in PHP. Save the mental juggle. Get it now.”
Rishab Kapadia

Developer

Tinkerwell: The PHP Scratchpad

The must-have companion to your favorite IDE. Quickly iterate on PHP code within the context of your web application.

Buy now Learn more