Mike Morearty
08 Jun 2007

Flex Builder 3.0 sneak peek: debugger tooltips

In a way this is a small thing, but it is certainly one of the most-requested debugger features, and I’m relieved that this is finally in the product: debugger tooltips. It really should have been in Flex Builder 2.0, but it didn’t make it in due to time constraints.

So you’re debugging:

1.png

You want to know the value of ‘i’:

2.png

Flex Builder is smart enough to figure out, from context, what expression you probably wanted to see, which is often more than just the single token under the cursor. In this example, when you hover over picDimension, Flex Builder is smart enough to realize that what you probably actually want to see the value of is picDimension[i], not just picDimension:

3.png

picPos[i] is an instance of class Point:

4.png

In the above screenshot, we didn’t automatically show you picPos[i].y, because there is an easy way for you to get that yourself, by hovering over the “y” at the end of the expression, as shown here:

5.png

If you hover over the “length” part of the expression “gallery.photos.length”, we figure out from context what you are looking for – you want gallery.photos.length, not just some global called “length”:

6.png

You can select an expression and hover over it:

7.png

Finally, in all of the above cases, if you right-click, there is a new “Watch” command, to add the expression to the Expressions view. As with the tooltip, it figures out from the current context what expression you probably wanted to watch:

8.png

And in case you missed it, Ted has been posting other sneak peeks all week.

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