How to find out Joomla JTable column/field names? - joomla

Question

I'm using Joomla 2.5 to build a medium-sized website, and I've decided to ease maintenance and content management headaches through creating menus automatically.
I've looked for extensions which did this, but only found Joomla 1.5 extensions. I ended up trying to upgrade a GPL extension called Auto Menu Magic.
It was easy to deal with the basic issues like the XML tags in the extension file, since there's a page in the Joomla which helps you migrate from Joomla 1.5 to 1.6.
The extension I mentioned has a function named onContentAfterSave which is called by joomla when an article is saved. I've been debugging through creating rubbish articles in the admin interface and changing the code to throw exceptions in several places, which I can see as error messages on the admin frontend.
This is where I got stuck:
$db = &JFactory::getDBO();
$menu = JTable::getInstance( 'menu');
$menu->menutype = $menutype;
$menu->name = $name;
$menu->link = $link;
$menu->type = $linktype;
$menu->published = $published;
$menu->componentid = $componentid;
$menu->parent = $menuparentid;
$menu->sublevel = $menusublevel;
$menu->checked_out = 0;
$menu->checked_out_time = 0;
$menu->pollid = 0;
$menu->browserNav = 0;
$menu->access = 0;
$menu->utaccess = 0;
$menu->lft = 0;
$menu->rgt = 0;
$menu->home = 0;
$menu->params = $params;
// Figure out the order (Just pop this article at the end of the list):
$menu->ordering = $menu->getNextOrder(
"menutype = ".$db->Quote($menu->menutype).
" AND published >= 0 AND parent = ".(int) $menu->parent
);
// Validate:
if (!$menu->check())
return NULL;
// DEBUG 2 -- Integrity check
throw new Exception ("menutype: $menutype, name: $name, link: $link published: $published, componentid: $componentid menuparentid: $menuparentid menusublevel: $menusublevel");
// Save:
if (!$menu->store())
return NULL;
// DEBUG 1
throw new Exception(" Could save! ");
As you can see above, I tried to throw an exception (DEBUG 1) when the menu was saved to the database. This exception was never reached, but the upper exception (DEBUG 2) is reached. This means that $menu->check() returns true, but not $menu->store(). I assume that the database is returning an error because some of the Joomla database structure might have changed after 1.5.
I have read the source a lot these past hours, but I can't find one thing. How can I look at the columns that a Joomla table uses, so I can debug this error properly?
Thanks in advance!
PS: I've looked at the SQL database too, but it doesn't help much. The variables seem to have different naming conventions from the column names.

Answer 1

I think it should look like this because I have been trying to convert auto menu as well!
$db = &JFactory::getDBO();
$menu = JTable::getInstance('menu');
$menu->menutype = $menutype;
$menu->title = $title;
$menu->alias = strtolower($title) ;
$menu->note = "Created by automenu";
$menu->path = $link;
$menu->link = $link;
$menu->type = $linktype;
$menu->published = $published;
$menu->parent_id = $menuparentid
$menu->level = $menusublevel;
$menu->componentid = $componentid;
$menu->ordering = 0;
$menu->checked_out = 0;
$menu->checked_out_time = 0;
$menu->browserNav = 0;
$menu->access = 1;
$menu->img = '';
$menu->templat_style_id = 0;
$menu->params = $params;
$menu->lft = 0;
$menu->rgt = 0;
$menu->home = 0;
$menu->language = '*';
$menu->client_id = 0;
I would be interseted to know if you ever got it working!

Answer 2

I'd suggest turning on Joomla debugging in the System Configuration. At the bottom of each page it shows all the queries it has executed, and this (depending on the plugin) might show you what SQL is being executed, and presumably, failing. There's likely to be a big list, so you may have to search through it a bit to find the statement you're interested in.

Answer 3

Fabio,
Many thanks! I will try it out and see if I can improve it further.
Mike

Answer 4

You're forgetting the first rule of Exceptions Club, if you throw something... you have to catch it.
I don't see a try/catch pair in your code so PHP would be stopping with a "Fatal Error..." for the uncaught exception so it would never get to the DEBUG 1. e.g.
Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Exception' with message ...
Try wrapping your code in a try/catch pair and allowing the execution to continue after DEBUG 2 have a look at the PHP doc's for exceptions