What is the best way to troubleshoot this error with parent::find?

I'm trying to build a PHP RESTful service using PhalconPHP. I'm new to PHP, so this may be a beginner question. I am following a tutorial https://www.toptal.com/phalcon/phalcon-php-restful-apis, and in the tutorial there is a section where it makes a call to pull the list of users.

public static function find($parameters = null)
{
    return parent::find($parameters);
}

I am passing in a list of parameters listed below.

Array
(
    [conditions] => 
    [bind] => Array()
    [columns] => users_id
)

but I keep getting a 500 error. I'm fairly sure it has to do with how I am connecting (or in this case, NOT connecting to the database).

I'm not 100% sure on what the 'parent' part does either, nor how it connects up to my MySQL database - I think I've gotten the config setup, and I've passed in the tablename that I'm expecting it to be under, but I have no idea if it's actually connecting up and then failing, or if the call itself is failing. So far I've tried echo and print_r with as many variables as I can find, but so far I'm not getting any information on why this is failing.

What is a good way to go about troubleshooting this? How can I find out what the 'parent' is? How can I find out if I'm connecting to my database even, or if it's failing before then?

Solution

In your concrete example, the quotes are missing in your conditions and columns parameters, it should be:

$users = Users::find(
            [
                'conditions' => '',
                'bind'       => [],
                'columns'    => "users_id"
            ]
        );

Which should return a list of users ids (if any).

That tutorial from Andrew Belousoff is very good but maybe the next step after Phalcon's REST tutorial, since it explains step by step the inner workings of Phalcon.

For debugging, you can also check Phalcon's guide about it: https://docs.phalconphp.com/en/3.4/debug

And after Belousoff, you can dive into deeper waters with this one: https://github.com/phalcon/phalcon-api