Symphony Documentation

Concepts

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Devkits

Devkits provide useful developer tools on the front end which facilitate debugging, profiling, and other tasks.

Overview

Devkits, or Symphony development kits, are extensions that provide additional front-end interfaces for authenticated system authors. There are two core devkits—the debug devkit and the profile devkit—which expose helpful contextual information for a given front-end page, including its source XML, its page template, any associated utilities, the parameters available to it, execution and load times, and more.

Usage

Devkits can be accessed by appending special GET parameters to the URL of a front-end page. For example, you would visit http://yoursite.com/?debug or http://yoursite.com/?profile to access your index page's debug and profile devkits, respectively.

Note that the devkit extensions must be installed and enabled in order for the devkit interfaces to be available.

Details

The devkit interface contains a link to the page editor for a given page, and additional links for each installed devkit. There are two devkit extensions included with the Symphony core:

Debug Devkit

The debug devkit, accessed by appending ?debug to a page's URL, provides access to the following:

  • the current parameter pool
  • the page's XML source
  • each XSLT stylesheet applied (the page template and any utilities included)
  • the result output
Profile Devkit

The profile devkit, accessed by appending ?profile to a page's URL, provides access to a number of statistics on page execution:

  • General Details

    • Engine Initialisation
    • Page creation process started
    • XML Built
    • XML Generation
    • Page Built
    • XSLT Transformation
    • Page creation complete

  • Datasource Execution (lists execution time for each data source)

  • Full Page Render Statistics

    • Total Database Queries
    • Slow Queries (> 0.09s)
    • Total Time Spent on Queries
    • Time Triggering all Events
    • Time Running All Data Sources
    • XML Generation Function
    • XSLT Generation
    • Output Creation Time
    • Total Memory Usage

  • Memory Usage

    • Engine Initialisation
    • Page creation process started
    • memory used to process each datasource
    • XML Built
    • XML Generation
    • Page Built
    • XSLT Transformation
    • Page creation complete