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Installation

Basic Configuration

Doze only requires two things to function out of the box: a serializer, and a responder. For the serializer, Doze makes use of the symfony/serializer package. You can find more information on using it's features in their README, but a simple example can be found below.

In the example, we first create a new serializer instance. The first argument to the constructor is an array of normalizers, which the serializer uses to simplify data prior to serialization. Both DateTimeNormalizer and ObjectNormalizer are shipped with symfony/serializer, and are used to normalize DateTime and generic objects, respectively. The second argument is a list of supported encoder formats. Our example only supports JSON.

Next, we create a new Responder instance, and call it's createResponse() method to obtain our Response object, which contains things like the headers, HTTP status code, and the response body. Please see the symfony/httpfoundation package for more information on the Response object.

Field Selector Notation

Sometimes, a developer using your API may only want or need a few specific fields from an object or array. To that end, Doze implements a selector notation that can be used to limit which fields are serialized and returned.

When calling Responder::createResponse(), you can provide an "attributes" key, which tells the serializer which attributes should be serialized and returned. Using the "attributes" context key is documented in the serializer package, but Doze also supports an alternative method of building the attributes filter.

In the example below, $responder is the Responder instance we created in the previous example. Since the fields selector functionality is intended to be exposed to the end user of your API, we're retrieving the selector from the $_GET global variable.

Notice that the JSON output by $response->getContent() does not contain the field "someOtherField", which was not part of the selector.

Field selectors can also contain nested selectors. In the example below, assume that $data has a field named "nestedObject", which has the fields "name" and "property".

Serializing Database Objects

Objects loaded from the database by certain libraries (such as Doctrine cannot be cleanly serialized, since they automatically link to related objects. In some cases, serializing a database entity can result in a huge tree of child entities being serialized as well. This causes a lot of unnecessary data to be sent across the wire.

Doze provides a special normalizer, the EntityNormalizer, that is aware of such database entities (via the EntityInterface interface), and will serialize ONLY the entities ID unless it is explicitly requested using field selectors. To use it, any classes that are used by your DBAL must implement the EntityInterface, and the EntityNormalizer must be in your serializer's normalizer stack above any other normalizers that might accidentally try to serialize your objects (such as the ObjectNormalizer used in previous examples).

With the extra normalizer added, any objects that implement EntityInterface will have ONLY their ID serialized, instead of the entire object, and any child objects. This can be overwritten by using explicitly selecting the entity (and, optionally, and of it's fields) using the Field Selector Notation.

Paged Collections

Coming soon.