Laravel / League Fractal returns an empty array instead of empty object

Question

I'm having a problem with Fractal library. I'm using Spatie\laravel-fractal library which is just wrapper for League\fractal. So...

I want to return an empty object instead of an empty array.

public function includeDocumentType(Question $question)
{
    return $question->documentType
        ? $this->item($question->documentType, new DocumentTypeTransformer)
        : $this->null();
}

$this->null() always returns [] after generation and I want to return {}. Tbh I want to have 2 functions like $this->nullItem() and $this->nullCollection().

Does anyone know what's the solution to this problem?

Instead of `$this->null()` you could just return `new stdClass()` (for the empty object) — ljubadr, Jan 10 '19 at 23:18
@ljubadr It won't work as this function is expected to return `League\Fractal\Resource\ResourceInterface` — Buglinjo, Jan 11 '19 at 15:26
Or you could return a `NullResource`, perhaps? https://github.com/thephpleague/fractal/blob/master/src/Resource/NullResource.php https://github.com/thephpleague/fractal/issues/124 — ceejayoz, Jan 11 '19 at 17:26
@ceejayoz The problem is `new NullResource()` is always converted to an array. I have created an issue on their library GitHub page. Hopefully, they will fix it. — Buglinjo, Jan 11 '19 at 18:46

Ozan Kurt · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-19T18:05:33.637

1

I just encountered the same problem. I wanted to return empty array instead of NullResource. Here is what I was able to find from the source code.

Instead of $this->null(), $this->primitive(null) did the trick. You can enter whatever you want to be returned.

In your case $this->primitive(new \stdClass()) should be the way to go.

edited Nov 19 '20 at 18:05

answered Nov 19 '20 at 18:00

Ozan Kurt

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Laravel / League Fractal returns an empty array instead of empty object

1 Answers1