Library containing serializers and deserializers for the basic Wikibase DataModel entity types and components they are made of. The supported formats are limited to public ones, ie those used by a web API. Serialization code for private formats, such as the format used by the Wikibase Repo data access layer, belongs in other components.

Recent changes can be found in the release notes.

Installation

The recommended way to use this library is via Composer.

Composer

To add this package as a local, per-project dependency to your project, simply add a dependency on wikibase/data-model-serialization to your project's composer.json file. Here is a minimal example of a composer.json file that just defines a dependency on version 2.0 of this package:

{
    "require": {
        "wikibase/data-model-serialization": "~2.0"
    }
}

Manual

Get the code of this package, either via git, or some other means. Also get all dependencies. You can find a list of the dependencies in the "require" section of the composer.json file. Then take care of autoloading the classes defined in the src directory.

Library usage

Construct an instance of the specific deserializer or serializer you need via the appropriate factory.

use Wikibase\DataModel\DeserializerFactory;
 
$deserializerFactory = new DeserializerFactory( /* ... */ );
$itemDeserializer = $deserializerFactory->newItemDeserializer();

Then use the deserialize or serialize method.

$item = $itemDeserializer->deserialize( $myItemSerialization );

In case of deserialization, guarding against failures is good practice. So it is typically better to use the slightly more verbose try-catch approach.

try {
    $item = $itemDeserializer->deserialize( $myItemSerialization );
} catch ( DeserializationException $ex ) {
    // Handling of the exception
}

All access to services provided by this library should happen through the SerializerFactory and DeserializerFactory. The rest of the code is an implementation detail which users should not know about.

Library structure

The Wikibase DataModel objects can all be serialized to a generic format from which the objects can later be reconstructed. This is done via a set of Serializers\Serializer implementing objects. These objects turn for instance a Statement object into a data structure containing only primitive types and arrays. This data structure can thus be readily fed to json_encode, serialize, or the like. The process of reconstructing the objects from such a serialization is provided by objects implementing the Deserializers\Deserializer interface.

Serializers can be obtained via an instance of SerializerFactory and deserializers can be obtained via an instance of DeserializerFactory. You are not allowed to construct these serializers and deserializers directly yourself or to have any kind of knowledge of them (ie type hinting). These objects are internal to this component and might change name or structure at any time. All you are allowed to know when calling $serializerFactory->newItemDeserializer() is that you get back an instance of Serializers\Serializer.

Running the tests

For tests only

composer test

For style checks only

composer cs

For a full CI run

composer ci

Authors

Wikibase DataModel Serialization has been written by Thomas PT as volunteer and by Jeroen De Dauw as Wikimedia Germany employee for the Wikidata project.

Links

Bugs on Phabricator

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/922/