toPlaceholders wrong behavior

[krava77]

Bug report

Summary

If an array value is empty toPlaceholders function does not clear the value in placeholder and leaves the previous value.

Step to reproduce

here is the result:

here is my code for the reproducing issue:
$item = $object->toArray(); echo "<pre>Object Data: {$item['ends_at']} <br>"; $modx->toPlaceholders( $object, 'subscription'); echo "placeholder: {$modx->getPlaceholder( 'subscription.ends_at' )}</pre>";

Expected behavior

the function should clear the placeholder if the value is NULL or empty.

Environment

MODX Revolution 3.0.1-pl (traditional)
PHP Version 8.0.25
Ubuntu FPM/FastCGI
paas2.fra.modxcloud.com
10.3.34-MariaDB-0ubuntu0.20.04.1

[Mark-H]

$modx->toPlaceholders() isn't scoped to any particular row or item, so that's going to remember a previous value if you don't set a new one.

Can you use var_dump() to confirm that $item['ends_at'] is a literal null? Looking at the code, it should still overwrite the previous value if it is provided an empty string '', but null isn't a scalar value so is indeed ignored.

Alternatively, consider rewriting your code to use $modx->getChunk($tpl, $item). That does scope placeholders to only be processed within that specific chunk.

[krava77]

Hi Mark!
Thank you for the answer.
Indeed the ["ends_at"]=>NULL . I get these values from the database.
So is there no way to add checking null value in the toPlaceholders function? Just creating my own checking of values?

[krava77]

I've resolved this issue by adding the following code before toPlaceholders, but maybe it will be useful to add this checking to the function to avoid unexpected results.

$object = array_map(function($v){
        return (is_null($v)) ? "" : $v;
    }, $object->toArray());

or
$object = array_map('strval', $object->toArray());