#PHP 8.1

Also, I don't think we need to postpone this on #3421234. We just need to use PhpSerialize. Then it can do whatever it's going to do and benefit from those improvements.

I'm not done working on this, but I need to save my progress because I've been making these changes on my work laptop and I'm about to head home for the weekend.

I agree with the things @berdir said.

this probably shouldn't be public inside the storage, it's not a meant to be a public api?

Yeah, I don't think we should put utility methods in entity storage classes. That's the kind of thing services are for. And we already have a service for serialization. Let's use it.

I'm not sure if we should silently drop invalid values

No, we shouldn't. We should be doing whatever PhpSerialize does. The utility method picked up a few extra things that it did that are outside the scope of this issue. Dropping the invalid values were included. It also included converting empty strings to NULL. That's a behavior change that could impact downstream code and I don't even know what prompted it. I got rid of all of it. Now the safeUnserialize() function only checks the NULL case, then passes the work off to PhpSerialize.

testSafeUnserialize has to be updated because I made that static utility function protected. Also, InitializeSerializedPropTest passes with or without the bug fix. So something about that test is wrong.

The Link field also has this problem with its serialized options column that can be NULL. See 🐛 Avoid error when $options is NULL in buildUrl() Needs work .

Love this. But curious how it would work in the Field UI. Is the idea that if a field uses this to manage allowed values, that those parts of the UI where you define the values and labels would disappear or something?

In 📌 Introduce and make use of NodePreview enum, to replace node related usage of DRUPAL_DISABLED, DRUPAL_OPTIONAL and DRUPAL_REQUIRED constants Active I'm looking to add a trait that allows you to do this very easily (although not quite like what is being proposed in the current MR).

The OptionsEnumTrait adds ::asOptions to an enum and forces a label method to be implemented. You can then use MyEnum::asOptions in the FAPI #options key, and also for things like field storage definitions with the allowed_values_function key