Serializer guidelines

The Serializer module provides a Spryker-native wrapper around the Symfony Serializer component. It exposes serialization operations through the Spryker Service layer and supports extension via plugins.

Operations

The SerializerServiceInterface provides four operations:

All operations accept an optional SerializerContextTransfer to configure behavior.

SerializerContextTransfer

The SerializerContextTransfer maps Spryker transfer conventions to Symfony Serializer context options. Supported options:

• groups — serialization groups for attribute filtering
• isSkipNullValues — omit null properties from output
• isSkipUninitializedValues — omit uninitialized properties
• isPreserveEmptyObjects — keep empty objects as {} instead of []
• isEnableMaxDepth — enable max depth handling
• maxDepth — setting a value also enables max depth handling; the depth limits themselves come from #[MaxDepth] attributes on properties
• isAllowExtraAttributes — allow attributes in the input that don’t exist on the target object
• isCollectDenormalizationErrors — collect all denormalization errors instead of failing on the first one
• isRequireAllProperties — require all properties to be present during denormalization
• isDisableTypeEnforcement — disable type enforcement during denormalization
• datetimeFormat — custom date/time format string
• datetimeTimezone — timezone for date/time normalization
• defaultConstructorArguments — default constructor arguments for denormalization
• symfonyContext — raw Symfony context array for advanced use cases (overrides explicit properties)

For the full list of Symfony context options, see the Symfony Serializer documentation.

Extension via plugins

The module supports two plugin interfaces for registering custom normalizers and encoders:

• SerializerNormalizerPluginInterface — provides additional normalizers/denormalizers
• SerializerEncoderPluginInterface — provides additional encoders/decoders

Register plugins in your project’s SerializerDependencyProvider:

protected function getSerializerNormalizerPlugins(): array
{
    return [
        new YourCustomNormalizerPlugin(),
    ];
}

Custom normalizers are prepended before built-in normalizers, giving them higher priority.

These plugins affect only the Serializer module’s own serializer instance. They have no effect on API Platform’s request and response serialization—for that, see API Platform serialization.

Built-in support

The module includes the following Symfony normalizers and encoders out of the box:

Normalizers (in registration order): UnwrappingDenormalizer, UidNormalizer, DateTimeNormalizer, DateTimeZoneNormalizer, DateIntervalNormalizer, BackedEnumNormalizer, DataUriNormalizer, JsonSerializableNormalizer, ArrayDenormalizer, ObjectNormalizer

Encoders: JsonEncoder, XmlEncoder, CsvEncoder