In October of 2000, I posted a rough hack of a CGI variable debugging module that I had written. At the time, it had some issues which limited its functionality. Despite that, I thought it was useful enough that others might be interested. After a post here and some discussion on UseNet, I decided it was not ready for prime time. In particular, brian d foy pointed out that its functionality was easy to duplicate with print statements and a little extra code(though my interface was much cleaner and easier to control). He did mention, though, that it might be useful if I had a logging feature.

Here it is, over half a year later, and I've finally found the time to work on it again. I've added several new features. The two that are most useful are as follows:

What follows is a sample program and the output...

use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI::DebugVars;

my $q = CGI->new();
my $write = CGI::DebugVars->new( -file  => 'debug_test.html',
                                 -trace => 1 );

my $test = &sub_one;
&sub_two;

my $foo = 'foo test';
my @bar = qw/ Bilbo Frodo Ovid/;
my $x   = 1;
$write->table( -header    => 1,
               -active    => 1,
               -condition => "$x > 0",
               FOO        => $foo,
               TEST       => $test,
               BAR        => \@bar );

my $sub_three = &sub_three;
$test = &sub_one;
$x++;

$write->table( -header    => 1,
               -active    => 1,
               -condition => "$x > 0",
               X          => $x,
               FOO        => $foo,
               TEST       => $test );
$write->finish;
               
sub sub_one   { "\&sub_one works "};
sub sub_two   { "Someone order a sub?" };
sub sub_three { "This is the third sub" };

[download]

The above code should produce the following:

Trace   
&sub_one
&sub_two
Caller, Package   main
Caller, Filename   C:\debug_test.pl
Caller, Line   15
BAR   
[
  'Bilbo',
  'Frodo',
  'Ovid'
]
FOO   'foo test'
TEST   '&sub_one works '
Trace   
&sub_three
&sub_one
Caller, Package   main
Caller, Filename   C:\debug_test.pl
Caller, Line   26
FOO   'foo test'
TEST   '&sub_one works '
X   2

For those who like POD, you can find it at this link or create it yourself from the module.

Unfortunately, I just discovered that my DESTROY method no longer appears to be called, so I need to call $debug->finish explicitly (and put it more cleanup code in the finishing routine). If anyone can tell me why, that would be great.

I don't think that it's necessarily ready for CPAN, but it's a lot farther along than it was.

Summary of above comments: please give feedback!

Cheers,
Ovid

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In reply to Debugging CGI Variables Revisited by Ovid

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