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Thread-Topic: Exposing jsonSerialize's depth
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Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2017 08:06:23 +0000
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Subject: Exposing jsonSerialize's depth
From: jani.ollikainen@valve.fi (Jani Ollikainen)

Hi,

I've made a pull request where I was asked to start internal discussion abo=
ut it.. The pull request can be found:
https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/1884
Which  relates to request I've also made:
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=3D72073

For short the thing is:
"We have objects that do dynamic loading and there might be recursions. We =
could use recursion depth to decide when we want to do dynamic loading and =
when not.

Now there doesn't seem to be any way to know how deep is the json_encode pr=
ocess going. If we try to use some level in jsonSerialize it just calls one=
 of those, no recursion there.

This could be easily archived by exposing the internal encoder_depth to jso=
nSerialize."

As I don't know any other way to get the depth info from jsonSerialize, as =
it isn't called recursively in PHP side, so adding some static class variab=
le and incrementing/decrementing it in jsonSerialize will just not work.

Then to why would someone really need that? Well, we have models that uses =
MongoDB as a database (created from MongoDB objects) and the models can hav=
e references to other models (coming from MongoDB objects). That loading wi=
ll happen dynamically and there might be recursions, but we want
still to serialize them as we really don't need to go that deep even if the=
re is a recursion. This way we can control the depth we are loading new obj=
ects and
can avoid recursion happening in jsonSerialize and can get the data we need=
 serialized.=20

If you are thinking why don't you just use the depth option of json_encode,=
 well unfortunately it doesn't help. It seems to go too deep and get recurs=
ion errors and would just later limit the depth it's going as my example wi=
ll show if you try if you run it without patched json.

Any comments/ideas?

--=20
Jani Ollikainen