symfony2 custom entity to array function - arrays

Question

I have to help me convert an entity to array but I have issues resolving associated records, which I need.
However, this gives me an error
The class 'Doctrine\ORM\PersistentCollection' was not found in the
chain configured namespaces ...
The code follows:
public function serialize($entityObject)
{
$data = array();
$className = get_class($entityObject);
$metaData = $this->entityManager->getClassMetadata($className);
foreach ($metaData->fieldMappings as $field => $mapping)
{
$method = "get" . ucfirst($field);
$data[$field] = call_user_func(array($entityObject, $method));
}
foreach ($metaData->associationMappings as $field => $mapping)
{
// Sort of entity object
$object = $metaData->reflFields[$field]->getValue($entityObject);
if ($object instanceof ArrayCollection) {
$object = $object->toArray();
}
else {
$data[$field] = $this->serialize($object);
}
}
return $data;
}
How can I resolve the associated fields into their respective arrays.
I have tried using the built-in, and JMS serialiser, but this gives me issues of nestedness limits, so this is not an option for me.
UPDATE:
I have updated the code to handle instance of ArrayCollection as per #ScayTrase's suggestion. However, the error above is still reported with a one-to-many field map. In debug, the variable $object is of type "Doctrine\ORM\PersistentCollection"

Answer 1

For *toMany association properties implemented with ArrayCollection you should call ArrayCollection::toArray() first. Just check it with instanceof before, like this
if ($object instanceof ArrayCollection) {
$object = $object->toArray();
}