Layout handles in magento design

I recently helped debug an issue in Magento where a block wasn’t being added for the Index action of a custom controller. As our usual weapon of choice Alan Storms commerce bug wasn’t installed finding out why the block wasn’t being added to the layout was a little difficult. To solve this I had a look a the layout object from the controller

$this->getLayout()

This returned the layout model object (Mage_Core_Model_Layout), this layout model is useful if your looking to create instances of blocks

createBlock($type, $name='', array $attributes = array())

or modify loaded blocks

getBlock($name)

The main method of interest is

getUpdate()

which returns an instance of the loaded layout update model (Mage_Core_Model_Layout_Update), This model stores all loaded handles used for the current layout, so by using

getHandles()

we can fetch all layout handles. This returned the following layout handles.

array (size=5)
string 'default' (length=7)
string 'STORE_default' (length=13)
string 'THEME_frontend_gravdept_custom' (length=30)
string 'doodletool_index_index' (length=22)
string 'customer_logged_out' (length=19)

Comparing the above handles to the xml used I can see they were trying to load designtool_index and not designtool_index_index. Problem solved and on to the next one.

So to find out the layout handles used add the following code to the controller after a call to load the layout.

$this->loadLayout(); 
var_dump($this->getLayout()->getUpdate()->getHandles()); 
die;

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