Seantosaurus

Propel ORM, Zend Framework, and auto JSON serialization

Zend Framework will automatically serialize objects given to the view, if you declare the action capable of JSON responses:

class MyController extends Controller_Authentication {
    public function init() {
        parent::init();

        $ctx = $this->_helper->getHelper("contextSwitch");
        $ctx->addActionContext("list", "json")
            ->initContext();
    }

    // ...
}

However, if you also use Propel ORM, your PropelCollections won’t get automatically converted, because Zend_Json isn’t recursive, and Zend_Json is handed all of the view objects wrapped in an array.

The way around this is to use PropelObjectCollection’s (which you will be using if you use Propel’s built-in query mechanism) built-in toArray() method:

    public function listAction() {
        $tags = TagQuery::create()
            ->filterByUser($this->_user)
            ->find();

        $this->view->tags = $tags->toArray();
    }

This way, everything will be copacetic: json serialization knows what to do with arrays, and PropelObjectCollection is smart about putting data elements into the array.