This Bugzilla instance is a read-only archive of historic NetBeans bug reports. To report a bug in NetBeans please follow the project's instructions for reporting issues.
There's one thing I'd really like to see in the debugger: it would be very convenient to have the option to display watches (all or selected ones) and variables (all) in a "toString"-fashion rather than as object. The reason is that in many cases I only see MyClass#1234, member variables aren't directly readable as well but, you need to open the node to show members which still might not be human readable. But there may be a toString method which would show the important things. In this case I always have to create a watch and add ".toString()" to the definition. Same applies to the Tooltips shown when hovering over a variable in the editor window.
A note on my experiences with watches, which might be helpful when designing the implementation of this enhancement: when I create watches with ".toString()" on objects whose toString-Methods call synchronized methods, I sometimes end up with the debugger stopping in Object.wait(). I don't know if there's any way to avoid this but maybe somebody else does?
Target milestone was changed from '3.4' to TBD.
I'm not sure of the technical issues here, but I suppose stack overflow (from unchecked recursion) and performance might be an issue with calling obj.toString() for all objects in the debugger windows. A suggestion was made in nbusers that the debugger windows have a seperate column called "String Value" which shows toString(). This could be disabled by the user by unchecking it for performance reasons. A workaround is to mouse hover over an variable in the editor (be sure the editor has focus) and the toString for that variable will be shown in the tooltip. (I donno what performance or recursion checking has been done with the editor debugger tooltip.)
Well, if you thing calling toString() would impact performance too much, then I suggest implementing the Display feature that you can find in Ecplise, where you select (or write) a piece of code in a special window and then this piece of code gets evaluated in the current debugger context.
I would like this String value column very much since I do a lot with BigDecimal's stored in HashMap and is quite difficunt to see what exact values are stored in a HashMap.
There is an optional collumn in the debugger 4.0 for toString(). I beleive it's off by default, but it is available. Closing - hope you don't mind.
That is great news! - Thanks!!! Randahl
Verified ... and Closing all issues resolved into NetBeans 6.7 and earlier.