Two CakePHP tricks

Posted by Felix Geisendörfer, on Aug 24, 2008 - in PHP & CakePHP » Core & Hacking

Hey folks,

here we go with post #5 of my 30 day challenge

Tip 1: Debugging frequently called functions

Imagine you got 100 assertions in the unit test of a function. Suddenly one or two unit tests fail. The returned result makes no sense whatsoever and you need to debug the function. If you just put a debug() statement in, you will see hundreds of outputs and would not know which one belongs to the case you are interested in. My favorite solution to this problem is to use the Configure class as a toggle for showing the debug information. But lets look at an example:

php
  1. $expected = array(2);
  2. $r = Set::extract('/User[2]/id', $a);
  3. $this->assertEqual($r, $expected);
  4.  
  5. // Test that is failing
  6. $expected = array(4, 5);
  7. Configure::write('debug', 1);
  8. $r = Set::extract('/User[id>3]/id', $a);
  9. Configure::write('debug', 0);
  10. $this->assertEqual($r, $expected);
  11.  
  12. $expected = array(2, 3);
  13. $r = Set::extract('/User[id>1][id<=3]/id', $a);
  14. $t his->assertEqual($r, $expected);
  15.  
  16. // Function to debug
  17. function extract() {
  18.   // do stuff
  19.   debug($valueOfInterest);
  20. }

This makes sure you only get the debug output for the one particular case you are interested in.

Tip 2: Custom config file

This is a very simple one. To make your application configurable via a global config file, all you need to do is the following. Put this code inside your /app/config/bootstrap.php file:

php
  1. Configure::load('config');

This causes a file called /app/config/config.php to be included. You can of course use any other name, but I like this one. Created the file inside /app/config and then fill it with code like this:

php
  1. $config = array(
  2.   'App.name' => 'Debuggable.com',
  3.   'App.guestAccount' => 'guest@debuggable.com',
  4.   'App.feedbackEmail' => 'feedback@debuggable.com',
  5.   'App.loginCookieLife' => '+1 year',
  6. );
  7. date_default_timezone_set('UTC');

Note: CakePHP expects an array named $config to be present in this file. So you could use App => array(name => val) to assign the sub values of the App key, however CakePHP also use the same key (App) for some of its settings. So you shouldn't completely overwrite it unless you know what you are doing. The keys used by CakePHP right now are: 'base', 'baseUrl', 'dir', 'webroot' and 'encoding'.

You can now globally access any of your config values. Here is an example inside a layout for setting the title element:

php
  1. <title><?php echo $title_for_layout.' :: '.Configure::read('App.name'); ?></title>

Alright, I hope you found something useful in the tips above,

-- Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined