How to increase CakePHP Debugger maximum depth - ajax

Question

I'm trying to debug my program by logging information from an ajax call. This is something that doesn't render a view, just runs asynchronously. The log will only display arrays to a depth of 3, and the documentation doesn't seem to have any notion that someone might want more information than that.
Please, how do I increase this depth so I can have access to this information without finding weird ways to render my ajax call? Or, if doing this isn't the "Cake" way, is there a better way to output info to a log or console for debugging?

Answer 1

I think this is not the case of CakePHP but an issue with XDebug or PHP configuration itself. You can try to add this line to your php.ini
xdebug.var_display_max_depth = 5
It works if you debug with var_dump(). You should write how do you try to debug, bacause different methods depends on different mechanisms.
If it doesn't work you can try to make the Cake to display original PHP error messages instead of its own error handler messages. In your core.php find code like this:
Configure::write('Error', array(
'handler' => 'displayErrorWithoutCrap',
'level' => E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED,
'trace' => true
));
And change it into this:
Configure::write('Error', array(
//'handler' => 'ErrorHandler::handleError',
'handler' => 'displayErrorWithoutCrap',
'level' => E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED,
'trace' => true
));
and add this line at the end of bootstrap.php :
function displayErrorWithoutCrap() {
return false;
}

Answer 2

I ended up submitting a ticket to the Git project for CakePHP and it was confirmed that the debug depth for arrays is hard-coded for log files. The response indicated that it would be considered for a change in the next version.
I ended up finding the number in the Debug class and changed it to a larger number which gave me more depth. Not the best fix, but it works for now until support is added to the next version.