search

zendframework / zend-expressive-hal

Hypertext Application Language implementation for PHP and PSR-7
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
37 stars 22 forks source link

No support for DateTime object in XmlRenderer #3

Closed grizzm0 closed 6 years ago

grizzm0 commented 7 years ago

XmlRenderer::createResourceElement() does not have support for PHPs DateTime object. As this works natively in json_encode() I feel like XmlRenderer also should have support for it to be consistent between the two.

Exception: Encountered non-primitive type "DateTime" when serializing Zend\Expressive\Hal\Exception\HalResource instance; unable to serialize

weierophinney commented 6 years ago

I'm not quite sure how we should go about this, to be honest.

DateTime does not implement either __toString() or JsonSerializable, so we cannot rely on either of those two methods to get the string version. You also cannot cast it to a string (e.g., (string) $date).

What json_encode() appears to do is serialize it to an object with the keys date, timezone_type, and timezone... none of which follow any RFCs or ISO standards from what I can tell.

What we could do is call $date->format('c'), which uses ISO 8601, which any consumer should be able to pass to its own language's date-time facilities without error. Thoughts?

grizzm0 commented 6 years ago

I'm just afraid people are already used to the json_encode format and might be using it in the wild. Although, as the package is still pre stable there's nothing that stops us from breaking it.

I myself already got an interface in my frontend to match the json_encode output. This is code I've been using before expressive-hal tho when I used json_encode myself.

Either format('c') or format('r') would probably work. r seems to contain a bit useless information tho and therefore c would probably be better. momentjs as an example checks for ISO 8601 first.