php-marshaller

Warning
This project is in very early stages of development and should be considered experimental.

This is a small library with few required dependencies to serialize and deserialize PHP data structures using optional annotation-based configuration.

Current features

• JSON and YAML serialization and deserialization
• Optional attribute or annotation-based customization of (de)serialization
• Recursive deduction of property types and optional annotation-based target types
• Circular reference detection
• Support for both PHP 8 attributes and Doctrine annotations (PHP 7.4+)

Planned features

• Support for other serialization formats, XML in particular
• More robust object instantiation capabilities
• User defined custom (de)serialization logic
• Performance optimizations
• Using getters and setters for data extraction and injection (as a default)

Installation

For general use, install the library with composer using:

composer require onemoreangle/php-marshaller --no-dev

Development

Install the library using composer with dev dependencies:

composer require onemoreangle/php-marshaller

Usage

Simple usage using default settings

To serialize and deserialize, you can use any of the available serialization providers which come with defaults to read attributes/annotations. For example, to use the Json serialization provider with defaults:

use OneMoreAngle\Marshaller\Api\Json;

$data = new CustomClass();
$serialized = Json::marshal($data);
$deserialized = Json::unmarshal($json, CustomClass::class);

Other serialization providers for different formats will be added in the future.

Customizing serialization

You can customize the serialization process by creating a SerializerBuilder and providing it with options. Often times you will want to use the default settings of the serialization provider and then customize them, which you can do as follows

use OneMoreAngle\Marshaller\Api\Json;
...
$serializer = Json::getDefaultSerializerBuilder()->withMetaExtractor(...)->build();
$data = $serializer->marshal($object);

Attributes

You can use attributes to customize the (de)serialization process. For example, you can use the Name attribute to map a property to a different serialized name, the Aliases to map alternative serialized names to the property, the Omit attribute to omit a property from serialization, the OmitEmpty attribute to omit a property if it is empty, and the TargetType attribute to specify the type of the property to deserialize into. Let's look at an example:

use OneMoreAngle\Marshaller\Attribute\Aliases;
use OneMoreAngle\Marshaller\Attribute\Name;
use OneMoreAngle\Marshaller\Attribute\Omit;
use OneMoreAngle\Marshaller\Attribute\OmitEmpty;

class CustomClass {
    #[Name('custom_name')]
    #[Aliases(['alias1', 'alias2'])]
    #[OmitEmpty]
    public string $property;
    
    #[Omit]
    public string $property2;
}

When you serialize an instance of the above class as follows:

use OneMoreAngle\Marshaller\Api\Json;

$data = new CustomClass();
$data->property = 'test';
$data->property2 => 'test2';
$serialized = Json::marshal($data);
echo $serialized;

the output will be

{"custom_name":"test"}

When we deserialize with an aliased property in the JSON:

use OneMoreAngle\Marshaller\Api\Json;

$json = '{"alias2":"hello"}';
$deserialized = Json::unmarshal($json, CustomClass::class);
print_r($deserialized);

We get the following output:

CustomClass Object
(
    [property] => hello
)

Requirements

• PHP >= 7.4 (to use attributes PHP 8.0 or higher is required, otherwise you can install doctrine/annotations and use annotations instead)

Contributing

Contributions are more than welcome! Please feel free to submit a pull request

License

The php-marshaller library is released under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more details.