March 8, 2016 Javier Eguiluz

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¶ 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¶ 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¶ Contributed by

Nicolas Grekas

in #16325 and #15787. In addition to the previous casters, VarDumper added other casters useful for generators and OuterIterator objects.