#19628 [Opn->Csd]: WDDX should allow user to specify the variable type

ID: 19628 Updated by: jan@php.net Reported By: jimmy@accellion.com -Status: Open +Status: Closed Bug Type: WDDX related Operating System: All PHP Version: 4.2.0 Assigned To: jan New Comment: This bug has been fixed in CVS. In case this was a PHP problem, snapshots of the sources are packaged every three hours; this change will be in the next snapshot. You can grab the snapshot at http://snaps.php.net/. In case this was a documentation problem, the fix will show up soon at http://www.php.net/manual/. In case this was a PHP.net website problem, the change will show up on the PHP.net site and on the mirror sites in short time. Thank you for the report, and for helping us make PHP better. we have wddx_serialize_type now Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2002-09-27 01:20:32] jan@php.net assign ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2002-09-27 01:15:30] jimmy@accellion.com I am using PHP's WDDX and find it very useful, but that's only if I use it to exchange data between PHP program. Once I have to exchange the data with other languange I begin to face problem after problem, mostly because of the way PHP's WDDX interpret the variable type. The solution for this is, instead of auto-detecting the type of a var, PHP's WDDX should allow the user to explicitly specify the type they want the vars to be encoded as. For example: $string = "1"; wddx_serialize($string, WDDX_INTEGER); // var $string will be encoded as integer, // instead of string $file_name = "contain some unicode char"; wddx_serialize($file_name, WDDX_BINARY); // var $file_name will be encoded // as binary, instead of string Two good reasons why this should be implemented: 1. The main purpose of WDDX is to exchange data between diff lang, and auto-detecting var type will break this purpose. Moreover, the type-juggling in PHP will make the case worst. For example, consider these two data: array ("2" => "Two", "4" => "Four", "5" => "Five"); array ("0" => "Zero", "1" => "One", "2" => "Two"); The first one will be interpreted by WDDX as hash (assoc array). But the second one, where the key happen to be a sequence starting from 0, will be interpreted as normal array, not hash. 2. If users can specify the type of a variable, then PHP's WDDX can support all type which is defined in WDDX standard. For example binary type. Currently there's no way to create a WDDX packet with binary type, because PHP don't have binary type variable. There's a workaround to manually base64 the var, but this will require a change at the other end to handle this workaround too, which in some cases is not possible. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/?id=19628&edit=1