How to encode Doctrine entities to JSON in Symfony 2.0 AJAX application?

Question

I'm developing game app and using Symfony 2.0. I have many AJAX requests to the backend. And more responses is converting entity to JSON. For example:

class DefaultController extends Controller
{           
    public function launchAction()
    {   
        $user = $this->getDoctrine()
                     ->getRepository('UserBundle:User')                
                     ->find($id);

        // encode user to json format
        $userDataAsJson = $this->encodeUserDataToJson($user);
        return array(
            'userDataAsJson' => $userDataAsJson
        );            
    }

    private function encodeUserDataToJson(User $user)
    {
        $userData = array(
            'id' => $user->getId(),
            'profile' => array(
                'nickname' => $user->getProfile()->getNickname()
            )
        );

        $jsonEncoder = new JsonEncoder();        
        return $jsonEncoder->encode($userData, $format = 'json');
    }
}

And all my controllers do the same thing: get an entity and encode some of its fields to JSON. I know that I can use normalizers and encode all entitities. But what if an entity has cycled links to other entity? Or the entities graph is very big? Do you have any suggestions?

I think about some encoding schema for entities... or using NormalizableInterface to avoid cycling..,

Answer 1

With php5.4 now you can do :

use JsonSerializable;

/**
* @Entity(repositoryClass="AppEntityUser")
* @Table(name="user")
*/
class MyUserEntity implements JsonSerializable
{
    /** @Column(length=50) */
    private $name;

    /** @Column(length=50) */
    private $login;

    public function jsonSerialize()
    {
        return array(
            'name' => $this->name,
            'login'=> $this->login,
        );
    }
}

And then call

json_encode(MyUserEntity);