Cereal

Cereal is a PHP package that allows you to easily serialize and deserialize your data.

Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require youcanshop/cereal

Usage

To start using the package, you need to create a class that implements the YouCanShop\Cereal\Contracts\Serializable interface, and use the YouCanShop\Cereal\Cereal trait which contains some helpers for a default configuration.

class User implements Serializable
{
    use Cereal;

    public int $age;
    public string $name;
    public float $weight;
    public bool $isStraight;

    public function __construct(
        string $name,
        int $age,
        float $weight,
        bool $isStraight
    ) {
        $this->age = $age;
        $this->name = $name;
        $this->weight = $weight;
        $this->isStraight = $isStraight;
    }

    public function serializes(): array
    {
        return ['name', 'age', 'weight', 'isStraight'];
    }
}

The serializes method returns an array of the properties that you want to serialize. Then the package will automatically serialize and deserialize the data based on the type hinted properties.

Note

• The package will only serialize public properties that are type hinted.
• The package will serialize properties in the order they are defined in the serialize method.

Serialization Handlers

In most uses cases, you will need to serialize and deserialize some properties in a different way. For example, you may want to serialize a DateTime object to a timestamp, or serialize a User object to an array or something. For that, you're going to create your own serialization handler and add it to the YouCanShop\Cereal\SerializationHandlerFactory.

class UserHandler implements SerializationHandler {

    protected UserRepository $userRepository;

    public function __construct(UserRepository $userRepository)
    {
        $this->userRepository = $userRepository;
    }

    public function serialize(Serializable $serializable, $value): string
    {
        return $value->getId();
    }

    /**
     * @param string $value
     *
     * @return ?User
     */
    public function deserialize(Serializable $serializable, $value): ?User
    {
        return $this->userRepository->find($value);
    }
}

In the above example, when trying to serialize a user object, we serialize only the ID, and when trying to deserialize it, we fetch it again from database.

Then, you need to add your handler to the YouCan\Cereal\SerializationHandlerFactory:

use YouCan\Cereal\SerializationHandlerFactory;

SerializationHandlerFactory::getInstance()
    ->addHandler(User::class, new UserHandler($userRepository));

Now, when working with our object that will be serialized, and if it contains a User instance, it will automatically be serialized and deserialized using our handler.

class Post implements Serializable
{
    use SerializeTrait;

    public string $title;
    public string $content;
    
    public User $author;

    public function __construct(string $title, string $content, User $author)
    {
        $this->title = $title;
        $this->content = $content;
        $this->author = $author;
    }

    public function serializes(): array
    {
        return ['title', 'content', 'author'];
    }
}

Laravel Bridge

// TODO