The MyBuilderTech.com site has a new tutorial posted talking about the use of traits and magic methods for optional value handling.

Recently I have been interested in experimenting with different ways to handle optional values. Their are many examples that exist demonstrating the use of the Maybe/Optional structure within the PHP landscape. I would instead like to focus my attention on only looking into the concept of 'orElse', which I have found to be a prominent control-flow whilst using these types of value. Typically, in an imperative mind-set we are accustom to evaluating a value, and based on its existence - defined as falsely in this regard - follow a different course of action, and by-way result.

He gives an example of where a value is checked for null and something else happens when it is. This is a common practice in PHP development, but he's more interested in other ways of handling. The first of these ways is with traits. His example shows an "OrElse" trait that can be used to perform the same evaluation but does some extra magic based on the method name called (his example is "findByIdOrElse"). If the trait method isn't for you, he also offers another possible solution around the use of composition. In this case he uses the same trait but makes it a part of its own class that's then given the object to work with (his "repository").

The post ends with one more "bonus" method for handling optional values - a simple function ("_or") that evaluates the arguments given and returns the first that's "truthy".