Re: [platform-debug-dev] Debug Work Items for 2.1 and Beyond

["Darin Wright" <Darin_Wright@xxxxxxx>]

...
3.  Better support in JDT for standalone debugging.  This is important for
customers who have purchased WAS but not WSAD, as they are less likely to
have all of their code in eclipse projects.  Also there does not seem to be
an easy way of getting existing code into projects.  The import file system
feature of eclipse sometimes treats .java files as regular files and
sometimes as compilation units.  Problems that arise from this are:
      Depending on how the file system is imported, breakpoints cannot be
      set on .java files.  It seems that JDT only recognizes .java files
      that are in a package.
      JDT will try to compile some of the .java files (if they are in the
      base directory that was imported).  It then shows errors for these
      files.  This is not very nice from a user point of view.  It also
      causes another problem in that inspect/display of variables will not
      work on a source file that has compile errors.
      The JDT source locator only finds source if it is recognized as a
      compilation unit, if the .java file is a regular file the source
      locator will not find it.
...

Java project creation/file import is not in the scope of the debugger. As well, compilation is not withing the scope of the debugger - these issues should be directed to "jdt-core-dev" and/or "jdt-ui.dev".

The issues pertinent to the debugger are:

(1) Setting breakpoints in ".java" files. Currently, we only support the setting of breakpoints in java files in the workspace that are on the build path of the project. There is a bug report related to this, requesting that breakpoint support be added to exteranl files (i.e. .java files in the local file system, and .java files not on the build path) - bug 13834.

(2) The debugger requires the ability to compile an _expression_ in order to perform _expression_ evaluation (we must perform type binding & method lookup). There is no way around this - thus, if there are compilation errors, we cannot perform _expression_ evaluation. This means that all types refered to in the _expression_, must be on the build path of the project, and compile without error.

(3) The JDT source locator will locate source in external files, and internal files that are not on the buildpath -> if you add those folders/jars to the "source lookup" path of the launch config. You should add the "extra" folders/jars FIRST on the source lookup path, as if a class file is located with the source locator that has no source attachement, that file will be displayed as a class file with no source attachment (since it is the first match found for a type name).

Darin