JMS Serializer unable to handle serialization loop

Question

Last night, my web app died with white screen being returned to a user. It didn't take very long to find out the root case: PHP was running out of memory.

After tracing the problem, I concluded that JMS Serializer failed to handle serialization loop.

I have class ProductGroup which has number of Product objects (list). Now, each Product refers to a group that it belongs to. So, when user tries to serialize ProductGroup , it does that, then proceeds to serialize each Product when it jumps back to ProductGroup (which was just serialized) effectively creating a serialization loop.

I managed to fix that but putting @Exclude on Product::group property.

So, the question is : Do I have another option when it comes to serializing? Is it possible that JMS Serializer is not capable of figuring out the loop?

Answer 1

You could try setting MaxDepth on ProductGroup->products and Product->group to ensure it won't go into a loop. Also using your approach with different serialization groups for groups + product and product + group could mitigate this and ensure that you can still have the associated group when fetching a single product.

Regarding your second question, having a references in both directions is even discouraged in Doctrine, so JMS\\Serializer throwing some kind of Exception instead of trying to "fix" it seems like expected behaviour.