# Want to understand the structure of a value stored in table 'form\_fields'

**URL:** <https://forum.mautic.org/t/want-to-understand-the-structure-of-a-value-stored-in-table-form-fields/16318>\
**Category:** Product Support\
**Tags:** development\
**Created:** [September 28, 2020, 2:17pm UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/want-to-understand-the-structure-of-a-value-stored-in-table-form-fields/16318 "2020-09-28T14:17:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![joshua](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.mautic.org/joshua/32/3467_2.png) [@joshua](https://forum.mautic.org/u/joshua)\
**Post date:** [September 28, 2020, 2:17pm UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/want-to-understand-the-structure-of-a-value-stored-in-table-form-fields/16318/1 "2020-09-28T14:17:43Z")

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**Your software**  
My Mautic version is: 2.16.2  
My PHP version is: 7.3

**Your problem**  
My problem is: Want to understand the structure of value stored in table.  
Was looking into database and found this strange value for column ‘properties’ in ‘form\_fields’ table  
The value is:  
a:3:{s:8:“syncList”;i:0;s:10:“optionlist”;a:1:{s:4:“list”;a:2:{i:0;a:2:{s:5:“label”;s:4:“Rent”;s:5:“value”;s:4:“rent”;}i:1;a:2:{s:5:“label”;s:3:“Own”;s:5:“value”;s:3:“own”;}}}s:15:“labelAttributes”;N;}

Please help me out here in understanding the structure of the value; so that I can use appropriate parser to extract the value from it. I am looking to collect JSON data from it. Want to understand the structure of the value stored in this column.

Some additional Information about the environment  
DB Version: 10.1.44 (MariaDB)  
ubuntu - 18.04

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![joshua](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.mautic.org/joshua/32/3467_2.png) [@joshua](https://forum.mautic.org/u/joshua)\
**Post date:** [September 29, 2020, 12:49pm UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/want-to-understand-the-structure-of-a-value-stored-in-table-form-fields/16318/2 "2020-09-29T12:49:15Z")

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After going through the Developer’s documentation by Mautic, I came to know that " Mautic uses [Doctrine](https://developer.mautic.org/#http://doctrine-orm.readthedocs.org/en/latest/), a database object relational mapper (ORM) and database abstraction layer (DBAL) library." - [https://developer.mautic.org/#database](https://developer.mautic.org/#database).

Type of column: longtext, Doc2Type: array

So column stores deserialized (by Doctrine) array; which gets serialized when accessed by the application.

[How to deserialize a DC2Type array datatype stored with Doctrine in your database](https://ourcodeworld.com/articles/read/646/how-to-deserialize-a-dc2type-array-datatype-stored-with-doctrine-in-your-database)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![joshua](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/forum.mautic.org/joshua/32/3467_2.png) [@joshua](https://forum.mautic.org/u/joshua)\
**Post date:** [September 29, 2020, 1:01pm UTC](https://forum.mautic.org/t/want-to-understand-the-structure-of-a-value-stored-in-table-form-fields/16318/3 "2020-09-29T13:01:53Z")

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You may think initially that this must be a complex format and that can be only decoded with Doctrine, however this string is just a normal serialized array created by [the serialize function of PHP](http://php.net/manual/en/function.serialize.php). Think of this as another notation to represent information like JSON or XML.

[How to deserialize a DC2Type array datatype stored with Doctrine in your database](https://ourcodeworld.com/articles/read/646/how-to-deserialize-a-dc2type-array-datatype-stored-with-doctrine-in-your-database)