Warringer's Works

Baking Cakes with Fire

Posted by Warringer on 22 September 2008 | 0 Comments

Tags: PHP, CakePHP

Or rather 'Baking CakePHP with FirePHP'.

Originally Posted at the Bakery FirePHP is an extension of the well known Firefox extension Firebug. FirePHP uses the Firebug interface to handle debugging and error messanges from PHP, you just need to include a single file into your PHP code. Sadly FirePHP is PHP5 only!!

I have found FirePHP by pure chance and thought that it would make a very good addition to Cake, especially cleaning up the browser from the debugging messages or the SQL fields below the main view during development.

Of course you need some things to use FirePHP.

1. Firefox 2 or 3(I guess everyone knows where to find it... :) )
2. Firebug http://getfirebug.com/ 1.0 or 1.1 for Firefox 2, 1.2 for Firefox 3
3. FirePHP plugin for Firebug https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6149 or http://www.firephp.org/ 4. FirePHP Core library for PHP http://www.firephp.org/ For general information about FirePHP you should visit http://www.firephp.org/ anyway.

Please note that the following way to use FirePHP is very basic at the moment and pretty much not more than a quick 'hack'.

The first is to put the file FirePHP.class.php into /app/vendors folder.

The next if to make a copy of dbo_source.php and put it into /app/models/datasources to keep the core of Cake untouched.

Now you just need to replace showLog() in your copy of dbo_source.php with the following.

<?php 
/**
 * Outputs the contents of the queries log.
 *
 * @param boolean $sorted
 */
    function showLog($sorted = false) {
        if ($sorted) {
            $log = sortByKey($this->_queriesLog, 'took', 'desc', SORT_NUMERIC);
        } else {
            $log = $this->_queriesLog;
        }
        if ($this->_queriesCnt > 1) {
            $text = 'queries';
        } else {
            $text = 'query';
        }
        if (php_sapi_name() != 'cli') {
            $summery = "{$this->_queriesCnt} {$text} took {$this->_queriesTime} ms";
            $header = array("Nr", "Query", "Error", "Affected", "Num. rows", "Took (ms)");
            $body = array($header);
            foreach ($log as $k => $i) {
                $row = array(($k + 1), $i['query'], $i['error'], $i['affected'], $i['numRows'], $i['took']);
                $body[] = $row;
                }
            fb(array($summery, $body), FirePHP::TABLE);
            } else {
            foreach ($log as $k => $i) {
                print (($k + 1) . ". {$i['query']} {$i['error']}\n");
            }
        }
    }
?> 

Next you modify your bootstrap.php with the following:

<?php 
   ob_start();
   App:: import ( 'Vendor', 'FirePHP', array ( 'file' => 'FirePHP.class.php'));
   function fb() 
   {
     $instance = FirePHP::getInstance(true);
     $args = func_get_args();
     return call_user_func_array(array($instance,'fb'),$args);
     return true;
   }
?> 

FirePHP requires output buffering and fb() is for convenience... :)

Now enjoy your baking with some more fire...

Through of course other Debugging can be done with FirePHP as well, aside from logging Database access, like in this example.

I'm pretty sure it can be turned into a Plugin, but I have to say that I'm a little to new to Cake to be able to create one...