CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

One question people often ask about is what hooks are called when. I got sick of sticking in debug into my code to see when things were being called & what values to pass so I stuck it in a module that I can turn on and off (with drush). It's not very smart & it requires devel module - but it's handy

https://svn.fuzion.co.nz/repos/fuzion-code/trunk/drupal/modules/custom/civicrm_developer

It's not a hugely public repo so I think I'll just expect people to cope....

If someone knows how to test if Civi debug is on I'll add that in so the module is 'quiet' if debug is off

That looks like a handy module.

I did something similar once. It's probably overkill in most situations, but it helped me understand a pernicious problem during a 2.1 => 2.2 transition. At the time, I was struggling to understand some subtle variations in $objectRef across various call contexts (e.g.  $objectRef in hook_civicrm_pre in the context of quick-add vs edit-contact vs API-call vs various profile-forms -- in v2.1 and v2.2 running on different installations); I initially tried to sprinkle dpm() calls into the code, but it was too hard to remember and compare the dpm() output from each call context.

The solution was to log all the hook invocations, including backtraces, hook parameters, and global variables.  This became the devel_hook module.  The various invocations could be browsed and compared after-the-fact, e.g.

 * Browse invocations: http://arms.dl.locker10.com/devel/hook-invocations.png
     (Note: Example shows pre/post hooks Civi 2.2 for two different page requests.)
 * View details: http://arms.dl.locker10.com/devel/hook-backtrace.png
 * Module code: http://arms.dl.locker10.com/devel/devel_hook-r2630.tar.gz

I don't think devel_hook is ideal for many situations -- it's certainly not as easy-to-use as civicrm_developer.  Never-the-less, it can be helpful when you know that your hook will be called in several contexts.