MenuItem (tree) is not serializable

[cjprinse]

I want the menu to be serializable, because we use a large menu (200+ items) and we want to cache the result.

When serializing the menuItem (including children) an exception will thrown:
Serialization of 'Closure' is not allowed

This is due to the injected ItemFactory.

solution will be to implement Serializable interface on the menuItem and reinject the factory on deserialization

[stof]

We cannot reinject the factory when using the PHP serialization API, as there is no way to hook in it externally (and we don't want to make the factory available in a global variable to be able to retrieve it from inside the unserialized MenuItem). So we cannot implement Serializable in a usable way.

My suggestion would be to use a more powerful serializer for that (one that allows hooking from the outside), like symfony/serializer or jms/serializer (and both of them would allow you to use the library without modifying it btw).

[cjprinse]

Ok, I understand. But why would you like the the have the factory injected in the menuItem anyway? menuItem should be a popo right?

[stof]

well, currently, we have methods to build childs on the MenuItem itself, to build the tree. This is why we need the factory.

[garak]

Can we close this?

[cjprinse]

Yes, fine to close