REST Export Serializer adds quotation marks to my field

Question

I'm using the REST export to expose a list of my nodes including some fields. One of the fields is paragraphs field with subfields.

I have written a formatter for this paragraphs field that puts together some of the fields within the paragraph and renders them as a json object.

The only problem I have is that the serialiser automatically adds quotation marks, which turns my json object into a string and thus renders the formatter futile.

Can I somehow tell the serializer to not do that to my field and just print the json string without doing anything to it? I couldn't find any setting in the view that would help me. Using a "raw output" only prints the paragraph ID.

EDIT: A couple of hours later I stumbled upon this article (https://blog.karmacomputing.co.uk/drupal-8-rest-endpoint-with-entity-reference-field-set-to-unlimited-using-views/) and the REST Views module (https://www.drupal.org/project/rest_views) which basically does what I want to achieve, but unfortunately only renders the entire paragraph content as an array and doesn't allow to change the labels. A boolean field is also printed as a string. It's close to what I need, but not quite it.

Answer 1

I had to change my overall approach to the problem, but managed to solve the serialising problem by using two additional modules:

https://www.drupal.org/project/views_field_view

https://www.drupal.org/project/rest_export_nested

The description of the REST Export Nested explains everything. The only thing that might provide problematic is the performance as this involves potentially calling a lot of sub-views. So maybe writing a custom normaliser as indicated in one of the comments is a better approach.