Community
Participate
Working Groups
Need to render changed variables in "accessible" way. Using color is not a good solution.
Need proposal on how to make rendering of changed variables generic accross debug models. Support is in debug UI. For example: - different fonts, outlining, backgrounds, overlays...
*** Bug 9051 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Note (from the newsgroup) we have just released code for Windows that will do this (it is in the nightly builds but I recommend you wait for the next integration build). There is new API on TableItem and TreeItem called setForeground() and setBackground(). The implementation for this functionality on motif, photon and gtk will also be available shortly. I don't believe this is any better for accessibility but could be combined with overlays to really stand out.
Decision is to user red labels for changing variables. Icons/text color are not accessible, and this feature is understood to be non-accessible friendly. However, red text is better than grey labels.
This is the agreed upon approach: IVariable implements the following method /** * Returns whether this variable's value has changed since the last suspend event. * Implementations may choose whether the last suspend event is the last suspend * event in this variable's debug target, or within the thread(s) in which this variable * is visible. * * @return whether this variable's value has changed since the last suspend event * @exception DebugException if an exception occurrs determining if this variable's * value has changed since the last suspend event */ public boolean hasValueChanged() throws DebugException; The "changed" information is kept in the model, and has the following benefits (side effects?): * a model may determine the granularity at which change information is kept - i.e. whether a change in a subvariable shows as changes in a containing variable, or whether change information is kept just for stepping, or also accross thread resume/suspends. * each variable view will show the same information (the feature is not view/time dependent) * if a view is closed/opened it can still show the information * the view does not have to cache and compare values * a presentation may display state in anyway it chooses, as the model contains the state, rather than a view I propose that we have a global preference to display changed values in a user specified color (default is red). Debug presentations that choose to may also use custom icons and text. ----------- The java debug model has to implement this support by having a debug target keep a suspend count, and each variable has to keep a "last changed" count (relative to the target suspend count). Whenever a variable retrieves its value, and it has changed, it updates its change count to the current suspend count. The #hasChanged method returns whether its count == target suspend count (if it is less, it has not changed).
I added the required API to IVariable and implemented the support in the java debug model. I updated the variables view to use the new API, but it still uses the old disabled images. (I wanted to get the API changes in before M5) Left to do: * use red text instead of disabled images * remove disabled image cache/support * remove preference to turn the changes on/off - it will always be on
Implemented in VariableViewer, VariableView, DebugPreferencePage, IDebugUIConstants and IDebugPreferenceConstants.
Please verify.
Verified.
