CakePHP Serializable Behaviour

Serializable Behaviour for CakePHP 2.1+

Use it if you want to save and read serialized data into db.

Installation

cd my_cake_app/app
git clone git://github.com/imsamurai/cakephp-serializable-behaviour.git Plugin/Serializable

or if you use git add as submodule:

cd my_cake_app
git submodule add "git://github.com/imsamurai/cakephp-serializable-behaviour.git" "app/Plugin/Serializable"

then add plugin loading in Config/bootstrap.php

CakePlugin::load('Serializable');

Configuration

Write global config if you need to use custom serialization function:

Configure::write('Serializable', array(
  'serialize' => <valid callable>,
  'unserialize' => <valid callable>
));

Attach behaviour to model:

public $actsAs = array(
      'Serializable.Serializable' => array(
        'fields' => <array of field names>,
        'serialize' => <valid callable>, // optional
        'unserialize' => <valid callable> // optional
      )
);

By default serialization uses function serialize, unserialization - unserialize

Advanced usage

If you want to use serialization with Containable behaviour you must modify your AppModel. For example we have 3 models that extedned AppModel: NewsPopular has many NewsPopularItem NewsPopularItem belongs to Article

NewsPopularItem and Article has some serialized fields.

Assume you want to fetch data this way:

$this->NewsPopular->contain(array(
		'NewsPopularItem' => array(
			'Article'
		)
	));
$data = $this->NewsPopular->find('first');

In this case you must add some configuration to AppModel::afterFind. In basic case there must be:

public function afterFind($results, $primary = false) {
	if (!$primary && $this->Behaviors->enabled('Serializable')) {
		return $this->Behaviors->Serializable->afterFind($this, $results, $primary);
	}
	return parent::afterFind($results, $primary);
}

And that's all! Now you have data structure with unserialized fields.