README.md

Serialize Bundle

This library is in early development, I wouldn't use it if I were you...

The goal of this library is to be able to take simple value objects and persist them in a Doctrine Entity in Symfony. Since Doctrine DBAL is leaning towards json for array-like structures, we need to be able to:

• Create a doctrine type that uses json as the column definition
• Serialize simple objects and Collection's of objects.
• Deserialize objects and Collection's of objects.

The last part is where it gets tricky. When serializing a simple value object in an entity like:

#[ORM\Entity]
class MyEntity
{
    public function __construct(
        #[ORM\Column(type: 'json')]
        private MySimpleObject $object
    ) {
    }
    
    // getters / setters / etc...
}

class MySimpleObject
{
    public function __construct(
        public string $name,
        public string $description,
    ) {
    }
}

Doctrine is able to serialize MySimpleObject ultimately using json_encode() and persist in MyEntity. Resulting in a column like {"name": "some value", "description": "A nice paragraph"}. But, when we retrieve MyEntity from persistence, doctrine attempts to set the array from json_decode() on MyEntity::object. This triggers a type error and the world ends...

This bundle aims to be a "wrapper" more of less around then existing JsonType provided by doctrine/dbal. During serialization, we end up with a column value like {"class": "App\\MySimpleObject", "data": {"name": "some value", "description": "A nice paragraph"}}. Then during deserialization, we can instantiate a MySimpleObject and pass the array of data to either the constructor method or set the properties with reflection.

I'm not sure if this approach is the most viable solution to the problem at hand. I'm not even sure if the problem really is a problem, or I'm just missing something obvious. Hence, don't use this library unless you don't care about your data. Wait for a 1.x release, before then, nothing is certain...