We get used to reading about big things – high-level architectural solutions, design patterns in action, or big data processing. However, most of our problems are small and lie at the low-level in our code. One of them is: how to synchronize a collection of entities with another collection, which is its simplified representation?

Imagine you have a collection of entities. You receive an updated version of that collection, e.g., from the API endpoint. But what if data are transferred using DTOs? We should add new entities based on data in DTO, update existing entities, and remove elements that don’t appear in the edited collection.

In this article, I’ll show you a generalized solution to this particular problem.

When you ever develop an API in the Symfony framework¹, you probably heard of the serializationGroup option. It allows you to define different groups of attributes to serialize and deserialize. However, defining these groups without proper consideration may make the whole development hard, e.g., if you need to deal with different scopes of the object’s attributes in many other endpoints.

I want to show you our approach to serialization groups in one of our projects. Together with my team, we use them to control the serialization of related entities on various endpoints in our API.