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Bug 58453

Summary: Improve variables view
Product: debugger Reporter: Martin Entlicher <mentlicher>
Component: JavaAssignee: issues@debugger <issues>
Status: NEW ---    
Severity: blocker    
Priority: P3    
Version: 5.x   
Hardware: PC   
OS: All   
Issue Type: ENHANCEMENT Exception Reporter:

Description Martin Entlicher 2005-04-29 16:30:56 UTC
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.
Comment 1 Martin Entlicher 2005-04-29 16:36:08 UTC
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.