data-transfer-object VS Serializer

Speaking of… https://github.com/spatie/data-transfer-object is dead, does doctrine offer similar functionality?

Once you are confident in the argument types, add them to the methods. If there are too many, create a Data Transfer Object. Also add method return types.

The benefits of using DTOs are numerous, there's even a package from Spatie for them. See the package's release post and this awesome DTO explanation for a more in-depth take and how to implement and use them in a more sensible way.

I opted to use Spatie's DTO package and a bit of additional custom code for easy casting. I decided to map each JSON column to its own DTO, so I created two classes for land and for army.

When possible, I surely will try using the spatie/data-transfer-object with attributes to see if I like it.

Open Source projects using this Action. Mostly my own projects, as I just released the Action. However, Spatie, a huge contributor to open source PHP packages recently added the workflow to their PHP package template; which makes me super proud ♥️

This spatie lib looks neat too, though it might not be all that static analysis friendly. I guess this doesn't save you from having two classes with the same properties. Seems like it could be worth a shot. Short of inventing a code generation tool I don't know how much better I can do.

Making a class "final" is always a bad decision IMO. You would never know how will other people use your library. For example, we used JMSSerializerBundle and wanted to extend DateHandler to make it not to throw exceptions if a date string is invalid. But the class is final. So we had to just copy-paste it :(

Or this popular alternative: https://jmsyst.com/libs/serializer

JMS Serializer: This library allows you to (de-)serialize data of any complexity. Currently, it supports XML and JSON.

Only took a very brief look, but it looks nice. I like that the DTO class isn't required to extend anything, and that it seems to be for real DTOs used for actual transfer of data between systems - not 'local dtos'. It feels like this might be more comparable to something like schmittjoh/serializer rather than spatie/data-transfer-object.

When it's time to create the PDF, convert the object structure to an XML using an already existing serializer (like JMS or symfony serializer) or do this by hand.

One frequently used serializer is JMS Serializer which allows you to convert JSON or XML to objects (or the other way around if needed). You can then use the objects in your application.