CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

It's a funny old world, QuickForms... but I never thought this odd.

I made a regular var_dump on the basic search form's $form value, and it returned over a megabyte of code. It literally crashes my text editor every time I try to make sense of it.

Over a megabyte for one variable in one function is probably normal, if you're modelling the effects of different enzyme protein foldings on HIV mutations, or looking for patterns in the stock market. But for a form with 3 medium-sized option lists and a text input?

Thinking I must have made a mistake in some mod coding somewhere (maybe accidentally typing "$form =& model_climate_change('tropic_of_capricorn','1995','2025');" ), I tried it on my fairly clean test install of 3.3. It came out even bigger - 1.69 mbs. This is just basic search - advanced search is bigger still, and I've not yet tried any of the really complex forms.

There's a serious question and a "huh?" question.

The serious question is, I need to know how to swap out an existing form element using a hook: how to figure out the naming convention, how to target it, etc. This is proving more difficult than it should considering that a) most of QuickForms' own docs are incomplete, contain mistakes such as parameters in the wrong order and/or haven't been updated since 1886, b) CiviCRM's quickform docs are mostly links to the above, and c) the debug variable containing the information I need literally crashes my text editor.

The "huh?" question is mostly, "huh?". From the small fraction of this code I've been physically able to look at, there seems to be many, many duplicates of my tags and groups taxonomies, and masses of what look to be config and error handling settings that appear to be duplicated multiple times. "{ ["_stateMachine:protected"]=> *RECURSION* } " appears a lot.

Does this sound expected?

Fun facts: 1,779,424 characters, 202,705 words, 407 pages...

A test tag name appears 108 times, a test group name 252 times, "RECURSION" recurs 873 times...

Brilliant, that does the job perfectly. Glad to hear it's nothing to worry about.