How to know what use statement to use?

Question

When looking up the documentation of yii it is straightforward to find the class or method to solve a particular problem, but how do you know what 'use' statement to place in your code?

I'm looking for statements like:

use Yii;
use yii\web\Controller;
use yii\filters\VerbFilter;

For example, the CDateTimeParser class has this information:

http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/api/1.1/CDateTimeParser
Package:        system.utils
Inheritance:    class CDateTimeParser
Since:          1.0
Source Code:    framework/utils/CDateTimeParser.php

What should the 'use' statement be?

You could open the source code file and look for a `namespace ...;` line. — Charlotte Dunois, Jan 01 '15 at 15:20
either what @CharlotteDunois said or use an IDE that supports code hinting, there's plenty out there and it turn out to be quite useful when working with namespaced web applications — Mr Peach, Jan 01 '15 at 16:42
Possible duplicate of [PHP namespaces and "use"](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10542012/php-namespaces-and-use) — Félix Adriyel Gagnon-Grenier, Sep 18 '18 at 22:15

arogachev · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-01T17:41:48.027

The same with Yii 2 documentation. You should check class reference.

The available classes are placed in the left menu, grouped by namespace and sorted in alphabetical order. Or you can find them with autocomplete search at the top of the page. In the detailed page you can see full class name including namespace in the header. Other information that you mentioned (inheritance, availability since version, source code link) is also available.

For example the information about yii\web\Controller is located here. And in your code with use statement it will be:

use yii\web\Controller;

Also you can look at the source code of framework or just use IDE autocomplete and auto import as suggested above in the comments.

How to know what use statement to use?

1 Answers1