Question

I am using this vim plugin https://github.com/ludovicPelle/vim-xdebug with xdebug

Xdebug and the vim plugin are working fine with regular scripts. I can step through and print out variables.

When I try to step through a basic unit test, it gets to the breakpoint fine and stops, and I can step through the code ok, but I can no longer view the contents of variables.

I am trying to get this to work with a very basic unit test

class testClass extends \PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
  public function testSomething()
  { 
    $a = 5;
    $b = 6;
    $c = 7;
  } 
}

When I step to the end of the method and try to print out the contents of $a, I get the following error.

13 : send =====> property_get -i 13 -d 0 -n a
13 : recv <===== {{{   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<response xmlns="urn:debugger_protocol_v1" xmlns:xdebug="http://xdebug.org/dbgp/xdebug" command="property_get" transaction_id="13" status="break" reason="ok"><error code="300"><message><![CDATA[can not get property]]></message></error></response>
}}}
response status=break xmlns=urn:debugger_protocol_v1 xmlns:xdebug=http://xdebug.org/dbgp/xdebug reason=ok command=property_get transaction_id=13
error code=300 : Can not get property (when the requested property to get did not exist, this is NOT used for an existing but uninitialized property, which just gets the type "uninitialised" (See: PreferredTypeNames)).
    message
        can not get property

When I print out the whole context the 3 variables show up as follows

$command = 'context_get';
 a                    = /* uninitialized */'';
 b                    = /* uninitialized */'';
 c                    = /* uninitialized */'';

I know that phpunit does some interesting tricks when it runs the methods of a test class, so that might be why the debugger isn’t returning the variables in the method. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

The problem turned out to be the version of xdebug I was using, apparently this is a known issue in 2.0 which was fixed in 2.1 The virtual machine I am debugging on is ubuntu 10.04 LTS

At the time that this version of Ubuntu was released xdebug 2.1 was still a release candidate. I compiled the most recent version of xdebug and I am able to view the variables within a method.