I know I can do this without the alias, but in this case trying to instantiate the object using an alias attempts to find a class by the alias name. Can this not be done in PHP?
// Import of manager, admin, etc login PageObjects
use Page\Acceptance\Users\Login as ManagerLoginPage;
use Page\Acceptance\Admins\Login as AdminLoginPage;
...
// Login user type snippet
$alias= $userType . 'LoginPage'; // produces ManagerLoginPage
$User = new $alias($this); // tries to instantiate a class named 'ManagerLoginPage', which doesn't exist
$User->{'loginAs' . $userType}($user);
As the documentation explains:
The ability to refer to an external fully qualified name with an alias, or importing, is an important feature of namespaces. This is similar to the ability of unix-based filesystems to create symbolic links to a file or to a directory.
And several paragraphs below:
Importing is performed at compile-time, and so does not affect dynamic class, function or constant names.
This means that when you write:
use Page\Acceptance\Users\Login as ManagerLoginPage;
$page = new ManagerLoginPage();
PHP expands the aliases during the compilation to:
$page = new \Page\Acceptance\Users\Login();
You have to put the complete class name (including all the containing namespaces) into the variable $alias
to make it work:
$alias = 'Page\Acceptance\Users\Login';
$User = new $alias($this);
You can use:
$alias = $userType . 'LoginPage';
class_alias('Page\Acceptance\Users\Login', $alias);
$User = new $alias();