Strange reflection behavior in php Laravel 4 - php

Question

This seems like a fairly simple reflection problem, yet I can't figure it our. I use Laravel 4.2 on Debian with PHP 5.6.6-1.
Basicly what happens is that I want to spawn a new object from a class in a Laravel QueueHandler like so:
$className = 'MyClass';
$myobject = new $className ();
and this doesn't work. I tried everything I can possibly think of and have no clue where to look. This code doesn;t work while it should:
<?php
use Pronamic\Twinfield\Secure\Config;
use Pronamic\Twinfield\Customer\CustomerFactory;
class TwinfieldQueueHandler {
private $twinfieldConfig = null;
...
try {
$twinfieldFactoryClass = 'CustomerFactory';
//returns 0
echo strcmp('CustomerFactory', $twinfieldFactoryClass);
//works
$test0 = new CustomerFactory ($this->twinfieldConfig);
//throws an exeption with message: "Class CustomerFactory does not exist"
$r = new ReflectionClass($twinfieldFactoryClass);
$test1 = $r->newInstanceArgs($this->twinfieldConfig);
//gives error PHP Fatal error: Class 'CustomerFactory' not found in {file} on line {line}
$test2 = new $twinfieldFactoryClass ($this->twinfieldConfig);
} catch (Exception $e) {
Log::error($e->getMessage());
}
Has anyone got any pointers on where to look and how to debug this?

Answer 1

ReflectionClass will ignore your current namespace and use statements completely. You have to specify the fully qualified name of the class:
$r = new ReflectionClass('Pronamic\Twinfield\Customer\CustomerFactory');
As a user points out on php.net:
To reflect on a namespaced class in PHP 5.3, you must always specify the fully qualified name of the class - even if you've aliased the containing namespace using a "use" statement.
Note that you could work around this by passing an object:
$test0 = new CustomerFactory ($this->twinfieldConfig);
$r = new ReflectionClass($test0);