My use case... I have traditional User entities with $roles array property. I have Project entities and a number of subordinate entities that "belong" to projects; i.e. Doc, Event, Note, etc. I have a ProjectUser entity that maps Projects and assigned Users. I have another $roles property in the ProjectUser entity that I use to grant additional per-Project roles to Users.

I have a Voter that accepts a Project entity. It's mimicking the stock role-hierarcy voter.

        $projUser = $this->em->getRepository('AppBundle:ProjectUser')
            ->findOneBy(['user'=>$user, 'project'=>$project]);
        if ($projUser) {
            $roles = array_merge(
                $user->getRoles(),
                $this->roleHierarchy->getReachableRoles($projUser->getRoles())
            );
        }

Without a change like the one proposed, I have to convert the array of strings returned by the ProjectUser.getRoles() method into an array of Role objects. Not the end of the world to do so but I think I've seen other places where one can pass a string or a Role object.

FYI, there is an attempt to completely get rid of the Role class (see #22048). And doing this change would involve the role hierarchy too.

Is the idea to just eliminate the Role class itself but still support the RoleHierarchy concept using just strings instead? Hope so. I find the hierarchy quite elegant.

Yes, there's no plan in dropping the role hierarchy concept. But we must of course adapt it if we were to remove the Role class.

Roger that. Thanks for the head's up. Do with this pull-request as you see fit. :)

Let's close here then. We can reconsider the decision if #22048 won't be merged.

By the way, please properly answer all the questions in the PR description when doing your next pull request. :) These values are used to automatically publish the labels here.