Symfony 2 Doctrine export to JSON

Question

I'm using Symfony 2 with Doctrine 2 to create a web service(JSON) for an iOS app.

To fetch my entity i do:

$articles = $this->getDoctrine()->getRepository('UdoPaddujourBundle:MenuArticle')->findAll();

I must tell you that:

$article = array();
$article = $articles->toArray();

Gives me the following error:

Fatal error: Call to a member function toArray() on a non-object

Same thing happends with

$article = $articles->exportTo('json');

---

How can i create a json response ?

Kind Regards, Cearnau Dan

Edit: var_dump($articles) =

array(18) {
   [0]=>
     object(Udo\PaddujourBundle\Entity\MenuArticle)#50 (4) {
    ["id":"Udo\PaddujourBundle\Entity\MenuArticle":private]=>
    int(1)
    ["name":"Udo\PaddujourBundle\Entity\MenuArticle":private]=>
    string(17) "My Article Name 1"
    ["description":"Udo\PaddujourBundle\Entity\MenuArticle":private]=>
    string(26) "My Article Description 1"
    ["price":"Udo\PaddujourBundle\Entity\MenuArticle":private]=>
    float(20)
    }
   [1]=> ...

- LATER EDIT

How can i loop through all the "property names" ? This is what i've got:

$myarray=array(); 
$myArray["name"]=array(); 
$myArray["description"]=array(); 
foreach($articles in $article) 
{ 
  array_push($myArray["name"], $article->getName());
  array_push($myArray["description"], $article->getDescription()); 
}

Answer 1

If you use a doctrine query you can also do this:

$em = $this->getDoctrine()->getEntityManager();
$query = $em->createQuery('SELECT ma FROM UdoPaddujourBundle:MenuArticle ma ...etc');
$myArray = $query->getArrayResult();

and then use json_encode($myArray);

See here for more details.

Answer 2

If you're coming from a symfony 1.x background, there was a lot more "magic" available for entities, including helpers to convert to arrays and so forth.

In Symfony2, most of the magic is gone; entities in particular are now plain old PHP objects that happen to be managed by Doctrine 2 for persistence to the database, which means that to have methods such as toArray() available on your domain object, you must implement them yourself. It should be fairly trivial to do -- simply return a key-value array with ("name of property" => "value of property")... if you have relationships set up with other entities, you'll need to implement a toArray() method on those as well, and simply call that from the main entity when you're converting.

Then, once you have your object array, $json = json_encode($array); will give you a JSON string to send as your response.