MongoDB, Symfony2 and REST/JSON

Symfony2 is a powerful php framework, backed by doctrine ORM. MongoDB uses a  JSON/BSON-storage for its documents.

While using SF2 for REST/JSON requests, JSON exports of DB objects is often required. There are many ways to achieve that from an ORM PoV:

• manual one by creating a toJson() and fromJson() methods for each Entity/Document
• use a serializer

In SF2, I do recommend JMSSerializerBundle : it is simple to install, thanks to Composer, and very easy to use.

For example, to encode data within the controller:

$serializer = JMS\Serializer\SerializerBuilder::create()->build();
$jsonContent = $serializer->serialize($data, 'json');

At this point, $jsonContent is a String. And to send it as an answer:

 $response =  new Response($jsonContent);
 $response->headers->set('Content-Type', 'application/json');
 return $response;

And that’s all.
To be a little bit more efficient, we can create a new “JsonResponse” class

namespace AB3\ExampleBundle\Internal;

use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;

class JsonResponse extends Response {

   public static function create($jsonContent) {
      $response =  new Response($jsonContent);
      $response->headers->set('Content-Type', 'application/json');
      return $response;
   }
}

From my daily usage, I’d rather put this ‘create’ method directly in a Root Controller that all my controllers extends, in order to simply common stuffs…

namespace AB3\ExampleBundle\Controller;

use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;

class ARootController extends Controller {

   public function sendJsonOk($data) {
      $serializer = JMS\Serializer\SerializerBuilder::create()->build();
      $jsonContent = $serializer->serialize($data, 'json');
      $response =  new Response($jsonContent);
      $response->headers->set('Content-Type', 'application/json');
      return $response;
   }
}

Then, the call is quite simply for any action into a controller

class MyController extends ARootController {

  public function exampleAction() {
    $data = ....; // get some datas to send back to user
    return $this->sendJsonOk($data);
  }
}