Automatic mapping of properties

[mnapoli]

Hi there, first time user of this lib so maybe I'm not getting it correctly.

I'm using this lib to serialize/unserialize DTO objects to JSON (or whatever).

So instead of using json_decode and ending up with a stdClass, I'd like to use:

$dto = $serializer->deserialize($json, MyDTO::class, 'json');

And $dto would be an instance of:

class MyDTO
{
    public $id;
    public $label;
}

Doing this manually, i.e. mapping stdClass to MyDTO is pretty simple. But I'm looking for a more generic solution.

But I don't understand why I have to add annotations to my DTO to force types. I have validation on a separate level, here I just want a DTO, i.e. a stdClass but with a known schema (good for autocompletion for example).

So am I missing something, is this something possible with this library? Or is there a reason it's not?

[schmittjoh]

We might be able to infer primitive types for JSON, for XML or object types I don't see how this could work. Therefore, when you deserialize data, type information must be added through metadata (f.e. @Type) at the moment.

[goetas]

answered