How can I debug a Views 2 block argument set via "Provide default argument" and "PHP Code"?

Question

I am using Views 2.16 on Drupal 6. I have the Content Profile module loaded and the profile has a nodereference field to another content type called Project. I would like to show a list of Projects in a block on the side when viewing the user page. I need to provide a default argument to a view since it is a block.

So the urls look like /user/admin, /user/joe who are related to content profile nodes 1867 and 1952 etc. I have the view showing correctly if I feed it a node id for a user profile as a hard coded value.

Now I want to do some stuff in the default argument code such as user_load(array('name' => arg(1)), content_profile_load($user->uid) and so on but it's not working.

What I have tried: print_r, var_export('abc', true), dpm($user), watchdog('php-test', 'a string').

None of these methods gave me any debug output. How can I debug the argument code?

Answer 1

Rather than trying to debug the PHP code in the view, use the devel module's ability execute PHP code /devel/php to debug the bulk of your code before putting it in the Views PHP default argument field.

$arg = 1;  // admin or root user
$user = user_load(array('name' => $arg);
$profile = content_profile_load($user->uid);
var_dump($profile);

Then when you are ready you can drop the first linewhere we used the $arg variable for debugging and instead use arg(1)

$user = user_load(array('name' => arg(1));

Answer 2

After more testing it appears that the watchdog function does work for debugging the embedded PHP code in the Argument Validator and Argument Default Value. I believe my validation was too strict previously and was preventing any output. For example embedding the line below in the "PHP validate code: " area gives all the argument components.

watchdog('block-args-php', var_export(arg(), TRUE)); 

Answer 3

I think you are using a couple extra steps here.

If www.yourhost.com/users/joe is a content profile with nid 1952 its system path is indeed www.yourhost.com/node/1952. But you are ignoring the fact that it is also "owned" by user joe, and instead going through the user load to get his (I assume :) uid, all the while it's already in there much like this:

 $node=menu_get_object(); // returns everything about the current node (so this won't work in a Views preview :))

where $node->uid will contain the owner of the node you are looking at, which, if we are sitting on a content profile, is that user's uid.

Further, in Views 3 at least, I've not used Views 2 in a long while, you can use a user id as an argument, and for the default argument needed in your block, have Views grab it from the url/set it to the node author, so, you may be able to do all of this without any custom php.