Old procedural code to Laravel. Many notices "undefined index". How to avoid the IFs?

Question

I have to transfer a lot of old procedural code to OOP in Laravel.

In this code there are hundreds of dynamically-generated arrays, which come form many nested ifs, foreachs etc.

Vanilla PHP doesn’t complain and gives only a notice, but Laravel throws an error for this:

$arr[$month][$year][$bla][$blablbalba] += $v;

The problem is in +=.

Of course I can easily solve this problem with:

if (! isset($blabla)) {
   // set it
}

The problem is that there are more than 250 arrays generated, and I don’t want to write 250 ifs.

I tried to use the magic methods __get() and __set(), but there is an issue with the __set() method when you try something as:

$this->someProperty['key1']['key2'] 

Getting “Indirect modification of overloaded property” message.

This is more PHP-specific problem, it’s not much Laravel-related, but Laravel in my case is the barrier that shows this bad practice in the old code and throws and error.

How can I solve this problem, without writing ifs like crazy? Just want to mention one more time that the arrays are dynamically-generated and differently nested, depending on conditional logic. I can’t define all of them in the beginning of the methods of the class.

Is there a clever way to do it, or the business logic of the code has to be completely changed (very bad scenario)? Thank you in advance. I appreciate the time devoted.

Here is one of the many foreach loops where these arrays are generated:

$heating_appliances = $haClass->calculateHA($scenario, $house_type, $year, $hd, $has, $ha_rp, $ha_dhp, $ha_chp, 'total_month', $extra_devices, $options);
foreach($heating_appliances[$year[0]] as $month => $classes) {
    foreach($classes as $class => $energy) {
        if(count(array_intersect($extra_devices, $groupsData[$class]['devices']))) {
            if($group_type == 'total_co2') {
                $profiles[$month][$class] += round((($energy * $co2[$class]) / 1000) * $energy_factor[$class], 3);
            } else {

                $profiles[$month][$class] += round($energy * $energy_factor[$class], 3);
            }
        }
    }
} 

Answer 1

Try doing this:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/39642147/1921979

My best guess: the issue isn't that laravel is throwing errors, or that plain PHP was okay with this code before. Rather your environment has changed. Your application has always generated notices but your previous environment was configured to ignore them. Laravel is (correctly) configured to treat notices as errors. The above link should change the error reporting in laravel to also ignore notices. However: if that works you shouldn't leave notices off altogether. Rather, you should call error_reporting() before your legacy code runs to disable reporting of notices, and then you should call error_reporting() again right afterwards to turn reporting of notices back on. For background:

Laravel's behavior is a good thing. A production application should generate neither errors nor notices. While you could ignore notices, that doesn't mean it is a good idea. They are frequently the result of bugs that are causing problems but not otherwise raising errors (for instance, a typo in a variable name). So the root of your problem isn't that laravel is reporting notices, but that whoever wrote your legacy application ignored notices and wrote error-prone code. In this case the notices are likely a sign of sloppy coding more than actual bugs, so turning off notices may be a viable solution here. However, the last thing you want to do is to just turn off notices all together and turn your new application into another soon-to-be-legacy-application-that-can't-be-run-in-a-modern-environment-due-to-notices. So if you disable error reporting for notices, don't do it throughout your app: just do it for the legacy stuff.

Answer 2

To shorten isset checks you can do:

$array = ['keyOne' => 'test', 'keyThree' => 'testing'];
$data  = [];

foreach ($array as $key => $value)
{
    if (isset($array[$key]) {
        $data[$key] = $value;
    }
}

var_dump($data); //this will display the orig value because there is 
                 //nothing set - but in your code I'm sure it will strip
                 //out not-set data

what this does, is foreach an array, test the $key against the original array and if it's set, it adds it to a $data array to use for SQL etc..