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According to hints provided by Sandip Chitale, the variables view should be improved to contain: 1. Name of the variable (icon should indicate modifiers) 2. Actual Type 3. Value 4. Declared type (because the declared type may be different from actual type) 5. Declaring type (because a field may be an inherited field) 6. Object id Sorting based on all columns. 7. Ability to see the long value strings in a detail pane. 8. Ability to display value using special formats based on the actual type and/or declared type e.g. show the value of Date object as the date - GMT, Local etc. It should be able to prefix/suffix a simple String to the displayed value. 9. Directly modify values of primitive types and string variables. 10. Directly modify values of Dates, Colors using property editors from java.beans.* package or other registered ones (this may be asking g for too much). 11. Copying the contents of the table as comma separated values or XML. To give some idea of what I am asking for I have attached a screen shot of one of the tools I have developed. Only thing is Object Explorer is reflection based tool and shows values in current JVM. (See contrib to try out ObjectExplorer). I sometimes use is as a replacement of print statement debugging.
Some hints are already implemented - 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, some should be easy - 10 (use property editors registered in the IDE), but some are quite complex - 1 (indicate modifiers), 4, 5 - depends on having information from the parsed source code - 8, 11 - not hard, but complex to implement.