Abivia Hydration

Hydration has several facilities for the intelligent creation of arrays.

Cast to Array

Why make your users do this:

{
  "something": ["some value"]
}

For a single-valued array when they would like to just do this:

{
  "something": "some value"
}

To achieve this, make the property an array by adding a call to `key()' and Hydration will convert the scalar value to an array.

key() is also useful for creating associative arrays from arrays of objects using a property of the object as the array key. Simply pass the name of the property to be used as the key.

class Element
{
    public string $name;
    public string $data;
}

class ElementManager implements Hydratable
{
    public array $elements;

        public function hydrate($json, $options = []): bool
        {
        if (!isset(self::$hydrator)) {
            self::$hydrator = Hydrator::make()
                ->addProperty(
                    Property::make('elements')
                        ->key('name')
                        ->bind(Element::class)
                );
        }
        return self::$hydrator->hydrate($this, $json, $options);
    }

}

Given an input like

{
  "elements": [
    {
      "name": "element1",
      "data": "somedata"
    },
    {
      "name": "element2",
      "data": "moredata"
    }
  ]
}

Hydration will set the $elements property of the ElementManager to contain two Elements with keys "element1" and "element2".

By default, Hydration will throw an error if the input data creates a duplicate key. The application can call the allowDuplicates() method to override this. The method takes a Boolean argument that defaults to true. If duplicates are allowed, earlier elements with the same key will be silently overwritten.

Selectively Casting to array

The json_decode() function can convert JSON objects into associative arrays by passing the JSON_OBJECT_AS_ARRAY flag, but the flag functions globally on the entire decode. Hydration lets the application perform this conversion selectively, by calling the toArray() method.

Property::make('someArray')
    ->toArray();