Description

I faced a stupid issue this morning. I have an API with a new property called metadata. It's an array in PHP, and it's stored as JSON in our DB. We can store whatever we want in it.
Fore example: {"hidePinCrawlExplanation":true}.

When the property is empty, its value is [] (in PHP or JSON).

But, in JS, I have an issue. If I write the following code:

user.metadata.hidePinCrawlExplanation = true;

I end up with the following "shape":

As you can see, this does not make any sens:

• it's an array
• but is has key

So when I serialized it back to JSON I got: metadata: [] 🤦🏼

Summary in one image:

(Thanks JS )

So an idea (from @pyrech): Add an annotation to the property to tell the serializer to serialize it as {} and not [] when the collection is empty.

Example

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="json_array")
     * @Groups({"user:read", "user:edit_metadata"})
     * @SerializeEmptyCollectionAsObject()
     */
    private array $metadata;

/cc @dunglas