Debug Helper Extension for Extbase

By Steffen Müller. Licensed under the Creative Commons License

Extbase in TYPO3 4.5 LTS has no built-in possibility to debug model objects. Whenever you try to var_dump() a model object or log it to t3lib_div::devLog(), you'll probably end up in out-of-memory exceptions. This article introduces an extension as a temporary solution for that.

What's wrong with var_dump()?

Because of circular dependencies in Extbase, dumps made with var_dump() will contain hugh amounts of useless object data of various framework classes. Your memory will probaly be exhausted and an exception is thrown. And you probably do not expect that with 1 GB of RAM reserved for PHP, do you?

A solution was backported from FLOW3 by Felix Oertel but it is still pending in the bugtracker. So we probably won't see it in TYPO3 core until 4.6. To fill the gap between now and then, I merged the code into an extension and provide it for download.

Extension Download

The extension ext_debug can be downloaded. It is in early alpha state and not yet finished. This is why it is not yet available in forge or TER. Be patient.

Extension Usage

e.g. in BlogController.php

[...]
 public function indexAction() {
    $blogs = $this->blogRepository->findAll();
    foreach ($blogs as $blog) {
      Tx_ExtDebug::var_dump($blog);
    }
 }
 [...]

Result

 

Oops, an error occured!

Yes, I am aware of that. The debugger still needs some work. If you want to contribute, please do so and use the Extbase bugtracker on forge. 

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