Configuring phpmyadmin to show Drupal 7 BLOB data

Hi,

This took me a bit to figure out and I thought I'd share it. Hopefully someone else finds it useful.

Drupal 7 serializes php data into long-blob fields, instead of just saving strings like in D6. This is great, because now D7 can store and retrieve arrays, not just strings. Hurray!

Unfortunately, out-of-the-box phpMyAdmin does not show this data as text, it just shows [BLOB - 14B]. Meh!

This is especially annoying for the "variables" table, where I'd like to be able to browse the actual data, not just how big it is. Fortunately, phpMyAdmin can be coaxed into showing this blob data in a nice way.

I work on a pre-made development environment called Drupal Quickstart, and wanted to include a solution to this problem. I'm posting it here as it may be useful to people who don't want to use Quickstart.

Anyways here's how to do it - add these lines to the bottom of your phpMyAdmin config file:

On Unix, you'll likely want to edit /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php.
On Windows, you'll want to install Drupal Quickstart :-D

The first line (maxrows) tweaks the default number of rows shown in the "table browse" pager.

The second line tells phpMyAdmin to show the BLOB data as strings. This may cause problems for other BLOB data, but works for serialized php data.

The third line shows the BLOB data on the row detail pages. It's editable, but be careful editing - you could wedge your site.

The fourth line is the tricky part. There's no config parameter for showing BLOBS on the "table browse" page. We can hack it by hacking the web request itself. This hardcodes "display_blob" for every request - making the setting in the "options" menu above the records useless. (Did you know there was a little options menu above the records? I'd never noticed it before this!)

Anyways, that's how to do it. If you'd like it done already, here's some Unix bash-fu to configure this automatically:

This works for phpMyAdmin 3.3.7deb5build0.10.10.1.

Fortunately, the $_REQUEST part came to me in a dream.
Unfortunately, that dream was the day after I released Quickstart 0.9.1.
This will be included in Quickstart 1.0. If you'd like it in your current version (0.9.1 or below), just open a terminal, and paste in the bash-fu above.

Have any other suggestions?

Cheers,

Mike

Originally posted here.