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Alireza Tabatabaeian avatar Drupal

Why do setter methods in an entity return $this?

cn flag
Alireza Tabatabaeian

Writing a custom entity type I noticed that all setter methods in entity classes are returning $this after changes, as methods modify the object and so object will definitely being modified, then

what is the propose of returning the objects? is it a best practice?

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avatar Drupal
cn flag
Clive

It's for chaining, e.g.

$an_object
  ->doSomething()
  ->doSomethingElse()
  ->andSomethingElse();

Whether it's best practice is up for debate, there's no right or wrong answer to that. Some like it because it looks nice (so called fluent interface), some don't like it because, well because many reasons.

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1103985/method-chaining-why-is-it-a-good-practice-or-not for some interesting opinions.

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4uk4 avatar Drupal
cn flag
4uk4

The benefit is, you can chain methods, like saving the entity after you have set values:

$entity->set('label', 'foo')->save();

Caveat: save() doesn't return the object, but the result of the save operation as integer.

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