Some tips about the eZ Publish debug

• Publié le 16 Novembre 2008 à 23:53
• 3 commentaires - 1 trackback

The eZ Publish debug is probably one of the most useful tool for the eZ developer. It is recommended to always activate it during development as you should read in it only debug or notice messages (and perhaps some translations warnings).

Enable the debug ouput

I usually activate it by putting those lines in the site.ini.append.php of the siteaccess I work on :

[DebugSettings]
DebugOutput=enabled
 
[TemplateSettings]
ShowUsedTemplates=enabled

Those settings activate the debug and display the templates used to render the page which is often a very useful information.

Don't show debug to everybody

It is also possible to restrict the generation of the debug by IP or by user id. This feature can be useful to monitor a live sites or to not annoy your colleagues when developing a site. With the following settings, the debug is only displayed for users visiting the site with the IP 10.2.2.157 :

[DebugSettings]
DebugOutput=enabled
DebugByIP=enabled
DebugIPList[]=10.2.2.157

Comment the line beginning by DebugIPList will make the debug disappear for everybody.

What happen before the redirection ?

DebugRedirection setting lets the developer read debug messages before an HTTP redirect. Instead of being directly redirected, you have to click on a button to view the next page. It can be useful to debug workflow events, content edit handler or extensions with modules and views... It is also possible to specify paths in this setting to enable this feature for only some pages, but this feature is undocumented for the moment.

Place the debug to not break your page

The default behaviour of eZ Publish is to replace the string <!-- DEBUG_REPORT --> by the debug output. If the string is not in the HTML code of the page, the debug will be placed at the end of the page. So depending on the HTML code, it's important to place correctly the string <!-- DEBUG_REPORT --> to not break the page with the debug.

Disable the debug for some special pages

As seen just before, <!-- DEBUG_REPORT --> is replaced by the debug output, so it's easy to comment <!-- DEBUG_REPORT --> another time in the pagelayout so that the debug is commented in some special pages for example in AJAX parts of a page or in exports based on a special layout. More details in Disable debug for custom layouts (/layout/set/xyz) topic in eZ.no forums.

Output something in the debug from a template

debug-log is an undocumented template operator that lets the developer output a variable and/or a message to the debug output. It's just an eZDebug::writeDebug call. It is sometimes easier to read and less obtrusive than using the attribute() operator, I use it in eZ Class Lists 1.0 to display the hash used to filter objects list with something like :

{debug-log msg='template fetch filter' var=$filter_hash}