Serialization Groups

Hey John,

You're totally right, we forgot to show the namespace in the code block, I fixed it in https://github.com/SymfonyC... - the correct code block will be available very soon on the website.

Thank you for reporting it!

Cheers!

Hey Krzysztof R.

Can you please provide more info about issue you got?

I guess it's related to PHP Attributes, some packages uses attributes instead of annotation, when supported PHP version is installed

Cheers!

Yes I'm using attributes, but annotations also did't work for me.
It was working fine for regular entity fields. But when I try to add e.g. textDescription field to the API it was not present in schema or endpoint (I tried to send it anyway, but didn't work).
When I enabled annotations in serializer config it started to work ;)

interesting Attributes should work without additional configuration IIRC...

Thanks again for investigation

I was starting from this boilerplate
https://github.com/martinso...
maybe there was something wrong with config. I'm not that much into symfony to check that. Anyway it is working perfect now so all good ;)

Cheers ;)

Hey Gianluca-F!

Yea, this is tricky because, thanks to the inheritance, you can't control make the serialization groups (at when using attributes) different on the body field for Blog vs Comment. Using simple methods, I can't think of a way to do this: no matter what serialization group you add to body, if that group is returned on the Blog detail endpoint, then it will definitely also be returned in the embedded comments from that endpoint. So, unless I'm missing some nice trick, I also don't see an easy solution!

What options do we have? I can think of a few, none of which are super great:

A) You could use XML for your serialization configuration. This would allow you to put different serialization groups for body on each class. The problem, of course, is that using attributes is way nicer. I'm not sure if you can mix XML and attributes (like use attributes for everything, but then just XML for the body field). My guess is that you can't.

B) Stop using inheritance. I'm sure you have some good reasons to use inheritance, but if you stopped, the problem goes away. If there is some logic you want to share, you could move the methods it into a trait (but not the property itself). Then, use the trait in Blog and Comment but then manually add the property to each class individually.

Beyond that, you could probably find some more technical trick... like maybe decorating the normalizer and then, if you detect that you are able to normalize a Comment in the context of a Blog, you change the normalization groups in $context before calling the inner normalizer. Probably possible, but pretty technical.

Let me know what you end up doing!

Cheers!

Hi Ryan,
thanks for your reply; yes as I go ahead with development, I'm having some issues with inheritance.
The reason why I choose the inheritance is that all these entities share up to 90% of properties ( a blog or a commet IS a generic content ) , so inheritance is natural BUT ... with API I'm having problems.
Another problem is with ApiIdentifier.
For news, I have that ID is the ApiIdentifier ( id is not shared ) but for another entity, SLUG is the ApiIdentifier ( slug is shared in base class ).
Also in this case, I have to copy the property also on Child entity, to have only one prop as ApiIdentifier.

I could continue to use BaseClass for setter and getter, instead of dozen of traits ... not very clear but ... who really care ?? :-)

Hello GianlucaF

If I understood you correctly, then you can do it with context builder. You will find it in the security part of ApiPlatform series

PS fast link https://symfonycasts.com/sc...

StayTuned! Cheers!

Hey Sam Z.

Did you add the cheese_listing:write group on it?

Hey, Diego!

I have the same problem as Sam. My setTextDescription just won't show up for the POST action when I use this serialization groups. I tried to change the name to setDescription and then it shows.

Hey @Alexsander!

Thanks for the extra info! This is interesting. I'm wondering 2 things:

1) If you use setTextDescription() (where it son't show up for the POST action), can you actually *send* a textDescription field in the JSON and have it update?

2) If you use setTextDescription() with an @SerializedName("description") above the method, does it show up then?

This is odd enough that I'm wondering if something changed in newer versions of ApiPlatform. If they did, my guess is that would be unintentional (i.e. a bug).

Cheers!

With SerializedName works. Thanks

Hey Ryan!

So I tried to do all over again and the problem is still the same.

1) When I (as shown in the tutorials) delete setDescription() and use setTextDescription() method instead everything is working fine. I have textDescription field and I can send/update database with this field. But as soon as I use serialization groups this field is gone from POST operation. I have only "title" and "price" fields. I also want to point out that in my "write model/schema" the "textDescription" field is shown, but in POST operation it is not shown.

2) No even in this case it won't show up. But since I can see this textDescription field in my "write model", this command updates it from "textDescription" to "description" as expected.

So when I use the post action along with @SerializedName("description") then the method works so it seems to be working as planned the only issue is it does not show up on the swagger page

Hey Sam Z. & @Aleksander!

Sorry for the slow reply - I had some time off this week :). Ok, with these new updates... and the fact that there are two of you having the issue - I'm *fairly* sure that this is some bug in API Platform in a newer version (than we use in the tutorial). I'd recommend opening an issue in API Platform if you can with the details. I can't (at the moment) test this myself... because I'm on SUCH slow internet that Composer barely works 🤦‍♂️

Anyways, if either if you DO create an issue, please link me to it and I can look / add any extra info to the issue :).

Cheers!

Did anyone open an issue yet? I can't find any on GitHub.
I happen to have the exact same problem as @Aleksander and @Sam Zlotnick.
Did you guys open an issue or find out how to work around that bug?
I also made the following observation:

the description field is shown in the Schemas/Model section from the swagger doc:
<blockquote>cheeses-Write{
title string
minLength: 2
maxLength: 50
price* integer
description string
writeOnly: true

The description of the cheese as raw text.
}</blockquote>

But under POST ​/api​/cheeses Creates a cheeses resource the field is missing, as the Example Value just shows:
<br />{<br /> "title": "string",<br /> "price": 0<br />}<br />

But when i click on "Schema", just next to "Example Value" it says:
<br />cheeses.jsonld-Read{<br />title string<br />minLength: 2<br />maxLength: 50<br />price* integer<br />}<br />

Am i confused, or shouldn't it say"Write" instead of read here?

Hey Tristan P.!

As I just mentioned on a different chapter, I think this issue is the same as the other one - https://symfonycasts.com/sc...

I am also not aware of any issue that's been opened yet - I would love if you could open it!

Cheers!

Thanks for the reply, I opnened an issue on friday: https://github.com/api-plat...

btw: great course and teacher!

Ah, great work Tristan P.! And it looks like someone has linked to another issue - https://github.com/api-plat... and another issue https://github.com/api-plat... which might be the same thing. That is GREAT news... because it makes it seem like the bug is definitely real and (hopefully) it should get attention. One user says that downgrading to 2.6.3 fixes it. I've added a comment to https://github.com/api-plat... to see if I can motivate someone to do some extra digging ;).

Cheers!

The below are the 2 setters I have for the description however in the swagger page under post it only shows title and price for the inputs

        /**
         * @ORM\Column(type="text")
         * @Groups("cheese_listing:read")
         */
        private $description;
	
        public function getDescription(): ?string {
            return $this->description;
    	}

	/**
	 * The description of the cheese as raw text.
	 *
	 * @Groups("cheese_listing:write")
	 */
	public function setTextDescription(string $description): self {
            $this->description = nl2br($description);
            return $this;
        }

Hey Nestor B.

I think that's possible, you can configure your groups by entity like shown in this example: https://api-platform.com/do...

Cheers!

Hey Dmitriy!

It sounds like you want to be able to add a group dynamically - maybe based on the currently-authenticated user or maybe a query parameter. Is that right? If so check out a custom context builder - we do something (sort of) similar here - https://symfonycasts.com/sc...

I hope that helps! Cheers!

Thank you, Ryan. I solved this problem with:

https://api-platform.com/do...

Your solution is interesting, but so far too complicated for me )

Hey Dmitriy!

Happy you got it working - my solutions are not always the only, or even the best ones ;).

Cheers!

Hey David B.

Hmm, your code looks correct. It makes me wonder if for some reason your cache didn't refresh automatically. Try deleting it manually rm var/cache/* and try again. Also, double-check that you're running in the dev environment because if you're in prod, then you have to refresh the cache after every single change

Cheers!

Thank you for responding so quickly! I manged to figure it out shortly after I posted the question. Out of pure frustration I did a cache:clear and that resolved the issue. My DEV evn is running on a virtual machine so i'll chalk it up to a VM issue.

I investigated a little bit further and it seems like the underscore in the property is causing the problem/error. For example `group_name` is read-only even though it has the serialization group to write but `position` works just fine. It's also with all the other underscore-properties.

When I set the properties to public the readonly is gone and it works.

Hey Paul

That's happening because you have an inconsistency in your "casing", I noticed that you have some "camel cased" properties and others in the "snake case" form. In theory, you should not do that, if you can refactor it, great! If not, you can choose which "Name Converter" to use (check this out: https://api-platform.com/do... ), or, you can use the "@SerializedName" annotation to choose a valid name https://symfony.com/doc/mas...

I hope this helps. Cheers!

Wow good catch! Thanks a lot. I changed my properties to be camel-case now and it works as `private` properties.

The weird question marks have been fixed, thank you so much for pointing that out Hintay !

Hey Hintay

ha that's a great catch! Thanks for the feedback, we will investigate this questions marks! )))

Cheers!

Hey infete

1) Yes, you can add as many groups as you want to your API resources

2) I don't fully get your question. What you want to achieve?

Cheers!

Hello,

I think MolloKhan is talking about conditional API response.
ie "Is there a way to ask for a specific normalization/denormalization context or group while consuming the API?"

use case:
User A can GET Title and price (cheese_listing:read_limited)
User B can GET Title, price and description (cheese_listing:read)

Hey JulienG

In that case what you are looking for is "voters". In this chapter you can see a good example of how to implement them with ApiPlatform https://symfonycasts.com/sc...
I also recommend watching this chapter (and a few more after it) https://symfonycasts.com/sc...

Cheers!

Hey sherwingaddis

> I noticed that the properties that were skipped have underscores in them. How do I fix this?

What you mean with that? I would need to see your code to get a better idea of what's going on (at least just that entity)

Cheers!

MolloKhan i have the same as Sherwin expierences. For example if a property in my Entity is named: "$elapsed_time" (notice the underscore) it's not showing when it's assigned to a serialization group. And for example the property $distance (without underscore) is showing up.

`
<?php

namespace App\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;
use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Annotation\Groups;
use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Annotation\SerializedName;
use Carbon\Carbon;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

/**

• @ApiResource(
• normalizationContext={"groups"={"detailedsegmenteffort:read"}},
• denormalizationContext={"groups"={"detailedsegmenteffort:write"}},
• )
• @ORM\Entity(repositoryClass="App\Repository\DetailedSegmentEffortRepository")
  */
  class DetailedSegmentEffort
  {

/**
 * @Groups({"detailedsegmenteffort:read"})
 * @ORM\Column(type="bigint", nullable=true)
 */
private $elapsed_time;

/**
 * @Groups({"detailedsegmenteffort:read"})
 * @ORM\Column(type="float", nullable=true)
 */
private $distance;

.....
}
`

Hey lexhartman

Seems like it's related to this problem https://github.com/api-platform/core/issues/1554
What you can do is to play with the @SerializedName() annotation to make it match to your property getter/setter

From the docs: https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/serializer.html#using-camelized-method-names-for-underscored-attributes - just scroll down a bit

namespace App\Entity;

use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Annotation\SerializedName;

class Person
{
    /**
     * @SerializedName("customer_name")
     */
    private $firstName;

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

    // ...
}

Cheers!

Nice, thanks!