Sometimes, you’ve got a situation where you want to have a globally available static function.  Most often this occurs (for me) in a debugging context.  Recently I wanted to have FirePHP available from anywhere in my project so I made use of the lib folder.

Unlike just about every other article on this site, for this one we’re going to be considering the folder /lib.  Note that this folder is NOT within local, but resident in the root.  As such changes here should be put within their own sub-folders so that they too will survive an upgrade.

It’s really quite easy to create your class, just follow the usual Magento naming conventions. I’m going to create Spinonesolutions_Devel_FirePHP so all I do is create the file: /lib/Spinonesolutions/Devel/FirePHP.php.  Note the similarity to Model naming.

In here I create my class definition:

<?php
class Spinonesolutions_Devel_FirePHP {
  public static function send($var, $label = "DEBUG", $style = "LOG") {
    if (Mage::getIsDeveloperMode()) {
      $request = new Zend_Controller_Request_Http();
      $response = new Zend_Controller_Response_Http();
      $channel = Zend_Wildfire_Channel_HttpHeaders::getInstance();
      $channel->setRequest($request);
      $channel->setResponse($response);

      /*
      * Start output buffering
      */
      ob_start();

      Zend_Wildfire_Plugin_FirePhp::send($var, $label, $style);

      /*
      Style     Description
      LOG     Displays a plain log message
      INFO     Displays an info log message
      WARN     Displays a warning log message
      ERROR     Displays an error log message that increments Firebug?s error count
      TRACE     Displays a log message with an expandable stack trace
      EXCEPTION     Displays an error long message with an expandable stack trace
      TABLE     Displays a log message with an expandable table
      */

      /*
      * Flush log data to browser
      */
      $channel->flush();
      $response->sendHeaders();
    } else {
      return null;
    }
  }
}

Now I can call Spinonesolutions_Devel_FirePHP:send() anywhere in my project.  Sweet!

global, lib, Magento, static