生成和调试报告的最佳MVC策略是什么？

Question

I'm looking to collect tips, blogs, and other best practices on debugging the generation of report data.

I'm not looking for reporting classes, many good posts exist here about this already. These won't help in getting the data from the data layer and readying it for printing (unless there's a library that has some relevant 'pre-flight' functions).

I'm working in a MVC framework (CodeIgniter, but that shouldn't matter), and so one debugging conundrum is the revealing of important variables at each point in the loops. Log it? Dump to screen?

I think using a step-wise PHP debugger would make the process easier, but I'm interested in pulling out better strategies for report generation and debugging in general.

I think that verbal description of any tips / etc would also be valuable to contribute.

Answer 1

Use Firebug / FirePHP : http://www.firephp.org/

It supports all kinds of logging to the browser, including tables and stack traces.

If you don't want to implement it by hand, the Zend_Framework Wildfire log writer can be used with CodeIgniter: http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.log.writers.html#zend.log.writers.firebug