Serializer Annotations

Hey Joan!

Ok, here's what's going on. If you don't specify a type, then the JSON will represent what the value is. So if the value is a string "5", you'll get "5" in the JSON. If it's a PHP integer 5, you'll get 5 without quotes. The reason you're always seeing quotes is just due to a shortcoming in the "ORM" that I built for this tutorial - it always fetches values from the DB as strings and sets them. In other words, if you dump a Programmer object after querying, you should see that the "integer" values are actually PHP strings. You should see a difference if you add something like the following to the bottom of the BaseRepository::createObjectFromData() function:

if (is_numeric($val)) {
    $val = (float) $val;
}
// this line is already there - so put the if statement right above
$object->$columnName = $val;

This causes true PHP numbers to be set, which removes the quotes from the JSON. Now the Type annotation also relates to this, but not in a way that looks super concrete to me. For example, if I set a true number, but mark that field as @Serializer\Type("string"), I see quotes in the JSON. But if I do the opposite - set a string on the object but mark the field as an "integer" - then I still see a string. It's a bit odd.

That's a long way of saying that the serializer should be creating JSON that represents what you have in PHP. and in this case, my ORM is always giving string values.

I hope that helps!

Thanks Ryan. I am not using your createObjectFromData() and I can't recall why, but the fix works for my own crappy version. Thanks :-)