While you can certainly tell your IDE the type of the object pulled out of your container every time you access it, it's better to do it once. Both of the following solutions involve subclassing the container. I just started using Pimple which recommends doing this anyway.
For containers that use instance members accessed with -> or exposed via the magic __get method, you can tell your IDE what type they hold. This is great because it doesn't involve any additional parsing when the code is run--only the IDE is bothered by it.
/** * My container. It contains things. Duh. * * @property MyService $service * @property MyDao $dao */class MyContainer extends Container { }For Pimple and other containers that act as arrays you can create accessor functions for the top-level objects you'll need. While it means more parsing when the container is created, it should be done once and kept in APC. I vastly prefer a method over array access anyway since it places the easy-to-forget array key inside an auto-completed method.
class MyContainer extends Pimple{ /** * @return MyService */ public function getMyService() { return $this['service']; }}BTW, for type-hinting inline variables with @var in NetBeans you need to use /* with one asterisk. This is not a doc-block comment and doesn't work with /** or //. Also, the name comes before the type.
public function foo() { /* @var $service MyService */ $service = $container['service']; ...}