The VarDumper component provides mechanisms for walking through any arbitrary PHP variable. More importantly, it provides a much better replacement for PHP's var_dump() called dump().

Symfony 2.8 added new casters to VarDumper, which are responsible to format the dumped information accordingly to their types.

Added caster for pgsql resources

Nicolas Grekas
Contributed by Nicolas Grekas in #15555

PostgreSQL databases are increasingly popular among Symfony developers. That's why Symfony 2.8 includes a PgSqlCaster to cast both connections and results.

When dumping a database connection, instead of seeing just a pgsql link resource string, you can now see lots of features of that connection:

Same goes for dumping the result of executing PostgreSQL queries, which now displays detailed information about the results:

Added caster for SPLFileInfo

Grégoire Pineau
Contributed by Grégoire Pineau in #14424

This caster displays detailed information about dumped SplFileInfo objects. These are for instance the objects returned by the Finder component.

Added casters for generators, reflection and outer iterators

Nicolas Grekas
Contributed by Nicolas Grekas in #16325 and #15787

In addition to the previous casters, VarDumper added other casters useful for generators and OuterIterator objects.

Better formatting of PHP + Twig code snippets in backtraces

Nicolas Grekas
Contributed by Nicolas Grekas in #15838

Lastly, another nice improvement of VarDumper is the formatting of PHP and Twig code snippets in backtraces. Previously, when dumping an exception you had access to the basic stack trace:

In Symfony 2.8, the exceptions not only display the file path and line which caused the exception, but also include a formatted excerpt of the code which triggered the exception:

Published in #Living on the edge