Cast the current object ($this) to a descendent class

Question

I have a class where it may be necessary to change the object to a descendent class further down the line. Is this possible? I know that one option is to return a copy of it

Answer 1

This is not possible because while an instance of a child class is also an instance of a parent class, the reverse is not true.

What you could do is create a new instance of the child class and copy the values from the old object onto it. You can then return the new object which will be of type myChildClass.