Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Eclipse Debugger, part IV

As I said in the previous part this time I will focus on the Variables view, which helps us preview the values of variables during the process of debugging.

The view itself is rather straightfoward, however, I'm not sure if everyone knows about the options available in the view's menu like:
  • changing the layout of the view - e.g. the view can be turned into the horizontal orientation or you can change the displayed columns
  • for java debugging you can turn on/of showing:
    • constants
    • static variables
    • qualified names
    • null array entries
    • referneces (I have already written about this: point 3) in this post)
I thing it is good to go through all this options and see how they work as some of them can be extremely useful while debugging.

One more thing worth mentioning is the possinility to change the details formatter. Look here if you want more details.

Looking for your comments!

P.S. Look to the comments for information about Logical Structures available in the Variables view. Thanks Curtis for this!

2 comments:

Curtis said...

Don't forget about logical structures. We still get enhancement requests asking for them when they've been available for years.

When you turn logical structures on, we replace the internal details of certain variables with a more user friendly representation. For example, we replace the contents of Collections with a neatly formatted array.

You can even create your own logical structures on the Logical Structures preference page.

Jakub Jurkiewicz said...

I have updated the post to let people know about the Logical Structures, I somehow missed it. Thanks Curtis!