The VarDumper component provides mechanisms for walking through any arbitrary
PHP variable. More importantly, it provides a much better replacement for PHP's
var_dump()
called dump()
.
Symfony 2.8 added new casters to VarDumper, which are responsible to format the dumped information accordingly to their types.
Contributed by
Nicolas Grekas
in #15555.
PostgreSQL databases are increasingly popular among Symfony developers. That's
why Symfony 2.8 includes a PgSqlCaster
to cast both connections and results.
When dumping a database connection, instead of seeing just a pgsql link
resource
string, you can now see lots of features of that connection:
Same goes for dumping the result of executing PostgreSQL queries, which now displays detailed information about the results:
Contributed by
Grégoire Pineau in #14424.
This caster displays detailed information about dumped SplFileInfo
objects.
These are for instance the objects returned by the Finder component.
Contributed by
Nicolas Grekas
in #16325
and #15787.
In addition to the previous casters, VarDumper added other casters useful for generators and OuterIterator objects.
Contributed by
Nicolas Grekas
in #15838.
Lastly, another nice improvement of VarDumper is the formatting of PHP and Twig code snippets in backtraces. Previously, when dumping an exception you had access to the basic stack trace:
In Symfony 2.8, the exceptions not only display the file path and line which caused the exception, but also include a formatted excerpt of the code which triggered the exception:
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