CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

This might sound like a merging of my two Dalesbridge CiviSprint passions, but who else would be interested in an extension that produces a visualisation of the code of other extensions or drupal modules? This would ideally show function call trees and dependencies, etc.

Does anyone know of any PHP script that could be adapted for this purpose? Or does anyone know of a drupal module that does this anyway? I saw Visualization Backtrace, but that's more on a page by page basis, I just want an overview of the whole module/extension.

Thanks in advance.

To get the call trees and dependencies, you'd have to decide whether to do a static analysis or dynamic analysis. I haven't personally done much with this but feel there are some well-known tradeoffs:

 * For static analysis, you need the source-code files and something like https://github.com/nikic/PHP-Parser to parse the code. This is probably faster and doesn't require you to predefine the "representative use-case", but it suffers a key limitation: really dynamic code (like the hook system used in Drupal/Civi) is difficult to analyze. (With PHP code like "call_user_func($f)" or "$f()", you need to know the value of $f, and that's Hard to foresee without executing the code.)
 * For dynamic analysis, you need to define some real use-cases; execute the software with those use-cases; and collect data based on what happens. Xdebug is often used to collect this kind of trace. You need to define good/representative use-cases for this to work, but dynamic code doesn't pose such a challenge (eg "call_user_func($f)" is executed for real, so there's no mystery about what it does).

It looks like Visualize Backtrace aims to support dynamic analysis based on xdebug. However, they don't seem to define the "representative use-cases" -- you need to come up with your own use-cases and generate the XDebug data. One possibility is to collect XDebug traces while running each the test-suite for each component/extension/module.