Domain-Driven Design in PHP

Doctrine Object Mapping Type

Doctrine has support for the Serialize LOB pattern. There are plenty of predefined mapping types you can use in order to match Entity attributes with database columns or even tables. One of those mappings is the object type, which maps an SQL CLOB to a PHP object using serialize() and unserialize().

According to the Doctrine DBAL 2 Documentation, object type:

Maps and converts object data based on PHP serialization. If you need to store an exact representation of your object data, you should consider using this type as it uses serialization to represent an exact copy of your object as string in the database. Values retrieved from the database are always converted to PHP's object type using unserialization or null ...