Preprocess property during deserialization

Question

Let say I have the following class:

final class Foo
{
    public string $bar;
}

The following data

{
    "bar": "SGVsbG8gd29ybGQ="
}

And the follwoing symfony/serializer:

return new Serializer(
    [
        new ArrayDenormalizer(),
        new ObjectNormalizer(
            propertyTypeExtractor: new PropertyInfoExtractor(
                typeExtractors: [
                    new ReflectionExtractor()
                ]
            )
        )
    ],
    [new JsonEncoder()]
);

When deserializing the data, an object with the correct data is created.

$object = $serializer->deserialize('{"bar": "SGVsbG8gd29ybGQ="}', Foo::class, 'json');

$object is of type Foo and the property $bar contains "SGVsbG8gd29ybGQ=".

I would like to "preprocess" the property $bar and decode (base64) the property and instead of having the raw value, I would like to have "Hello world". I tried using the context of a custom denormalizer, but had no success. Is there any way for achieving this?

Many thanks. Regards.

Answer 1

I finally found a simple and effective solution: use a normalizer which re-executes the normalization afterwards. To be sure that the decoding is not performed multiple times, a value in the context is added.

<?php

declare(strict_types=1);

use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Exception\BadMethodCallException;
use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Normalizer\DenormalizerAwareInterface;
use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Normalizer\DenormalizerAwareTrait;
use Symfony\Component\Serializer\Normalizer\DenormalizerInterface;

final class FooDenormalizer implements DenormalizerInterface, DenormalizerAwareInterface
{
    use DenormalizerAwareTrait;

    private const ALREADY_CALLED = 'FOO_PREPROCESS_ALREADY_CALLED';


    public function denormalize(mixed $data, string $type, string $format = null, array $context = [])
    {
        if ($this->denormalizer === null) {
            throw new BadMethodCallException('Please set a denormalizer before calling denormalize()!');
        }

        $data['bar'] = base64_decode($data['bar']);
        $context[self::ALREADY_CALLED] = true;

        return $this->denormalizer->denormalize($data, $type, $format, $context);
    }

    public function supportsDenormalization(mixed $data, string $type, string $format = null, array $context = []): bool
    {
        if ($context[self::ALREADY_CALLED] ?? false) {
            return false;
        }

        return $type === Foo::class;
    }
}

This custom normalizer is added to the list:

return new Serializer(
    [
        new FooDenormalizer(),
        new ArrayDenormalizer(),
        new ObjectNormalizer(
            propertyTypeExtractor: new PropertyInfoExtractor(
                typeExtractors: [
                    new ReflectionExtractor()
                ]
            )
        )
    ],
    [new JsonEncoder()]
);

When the deserialization is done, the normalizer will be called twice:

• The first time the value is decoded
• The second time it is skipped because the context contains self::ALREADY_CALLED with the value true