Collection Of Specific Objects With Empty Collection Not Allowed?

[TheFerrettDeveloper]

So I have this field on a data object:

/** @var Collection <int, SearchTerms> */
public Collection $search_terms

Yet whenever I initiate it with an empty Collection (as not every search has these terms), I'm getting an error that "The search terms field is required".

Is that... expected behavior? Is there a way to say "It's a Collection of these objects, but no objects is also okay?"

[rubenvanassche]

Use a default?

public Collection $search_terms = new Collection()

Only allowed in constructors if I'm not mistaken

[cyppe]

Doing this still does not pass validation if you pass empty array

somethingData::from(['search_terms' = []]);

Or even skip it.

It seems to work with adding

  #[Sometimes]
  public Collection $search_terms = new Collection()

But will test a bit more. But @rubenvanassche do you have some input regarding what is most "correct" way of doing this?

I do not want to use Collection|Optional as type, as phpstan on high level will not accept doing a check like:

$object->search_terms->isNotEmpty() as it might be of type Optional.

[cyppe]

Did some more testing, and it seems like everything works as expected out of the box as long as I use a collection of Data objects:

        /** @var Collection<int, ProductVariantData> */
        public Collection $variants,

I only face issue when I try to to store some kind of array inside the Collection. So I just switched the remaining Collection properties to use Data objects and it works fine now where it auto creates empty collection when I send empty array.