Symfony - Deserialize json to an array of entities

Since Symfony Serializer Component 2.8 to deserialize array of objects:

$persons = $serializer->deserialize($data, 'Acme\Person[]', 'json');

https://symfony.com/doc/master/components/serializer.html#handling-arrays

I think the best solution here is to create new PosteResponse class, like this one:

namespace Moodress\Bundle\PosteBundle\Response;

use JMS\Serializer\Annotation\Type;

class PosteResponse
{
    /**
     * @Type("integer")
     */
    private $total;

    /**
     * @Type("array<Moodress\Bundle\PosteBundle\Entity\Poste>")
     */
    private $data;

    //getters here
}

and deserialize your response to that class:

$response = $serializer->deserialize(
    $json,
    'Moodress\Bundle\PosteBundle\Response\PosteResponse',
    'json'
);
$posts = $response->getData();

That WILL do the trick, and it doesn't require you to decode and encode your json manually which is riddiculous in my opinion.

A less than ideal solution that I found was to first decode and then encode the json data again at the node that represents the data array. For example in your case:

$json = json_decode($json);
$json = json_encode($json->data);
$serializer->deserialize($json, 'array<Moodress\Bundle\PosteBundle\Entity\Poste>', 'json');

There must be a better solution than this but this seems more elegant than the above solution of de-serialising json.