ZF2 Doctrine2 repository result as array

I have the problem, that I have two controllers. One is a restful controller which only handles json data and returns a JsonModel, and the other one is a default controller which returns a ViewModel Now I have the problem, that my method only returns an array of entities, which is correct for the default controller, but my restful controller needs the entities as an array. How can I handle this?

MealController

class MealController extends AbstractRestfulController {
    protected $mealService;

    public function getList() {
        $meals = $this->mealService->getAllMeals();

        return new JsonModel($meals);
    }
}

MealService

class MealService {
    protected $mealRepository;

    public function getAllMeals() {
        return $this->mealRepository->findAll();
    }
}

MealRepository

class MealRepository extends EntityRepository {
    public function findAll() {
        $queryBuilder = $this->createQueryBuilder('meal')
            ->orderBy('title');

        return $queryBuilder->getQuery()->getResult();
    }
}

Answer

You coud use for that Array Hydration. It allows to specify a hydration mode when executing queries, and change the data type of the results returned. You just need to use the constant Query::HYDRATE_ARRAY as parameter in your getResult() method :

public function findAll() {
    $queryBuilder = $this->createQueryBuilder('meal')
        ->orderBy('title');

    return $queryBuilder->getQuery()->getResult(DoctrineORMQuery::HYDRATE_ARRAY);
}

Maybe you could also take a look at the EntitySerializer class which let you create an array of json from an entity :

$entitySerializer = new EntitySerializer($em);
$entityAsArray = $entitySerializer->toArray($entity);