Question

I have quite a big application, sometimes with pretty complicate data being created by the user (on the way to the database the data is being altered a lot). The issue is, that any time I need to alter the code, I get stuck for quite a few hours before finding the problem.

Actions in my app:

1. User opens the jquery modal dialog
2. There is a form in the modal dialog
3. User alerts the data and saves it

About app:

1. The application contains of one site with a table and several buttons
2. Each of these buttons open a different modal dialog
3. Each form submission is handled via ajax -> cakephps this->js->submit

How I wrote the code:

1. For each modal dialog I created an element
2. After clicking the button I open the element as a jquery modal dialog
3. Lots of these modals gain information via for example: “On click/on double click etc” events.

My problem:

Every time I alter the cakephp code which is called by $this->Js->submit I feel like putting a gun to my face and pulling the trigger.

I dont know of any easy way of how to debug variables in these functions (cakephps debug doesnt show anything ofc -> the view of those ajax/php functions are not in the main site)

Dont know if firebug has any features for debugging php, but I dont know of any.

The only thing that works for me a bit is commenting out lines of code and putting an alert in the success like this to maybe sometimes get to the values, but it doesnt feel right.

Being used to write code in c++/java and printing or debugging with breakpoints makes me frustrated, when I use such a modern programming language and try to guess out where the bugs might be..

Most errors:

Mostly null pointers or checking !isset index being accessed, but since I know of no way of printing these errors from modals no checking on the indexes helps me.

Answer 1

Use FirePHP it is a great enhancment of firebug. Works well.