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Say Goodbye to all those MESSAGEs and STOPs!
Neither the MESSAGE and STOP statements were designed for debugging. They are not safe, and when you use them they generate additional events that your application needs to process. That means that you are not debugging exactly the same application you will send to your customers. Besides, the risk of letting one of those "debug" messages in the application shipped to the customers is high, unless you are extremely careful.
Fortunately, awDebugger introduces the concept of Tracepoints to the Clarion world. Tracepoints are very similar to breakpoints, but instead of suspending the execution of the application being debugged, they just write a log message to the Trace Output window and continue executing the application as if nothing had happened. This allows you to find out what your program is doing without having to go step by step through your code, which can be tedious depending on the code you need to debug.
Tracepoints are the perfect replacement for the MESSAGE/STOP debugging technique, with some important advantages over these two:
- Tracepoints are safer than MESSAGEs and STOPs
- You don't need to modify your code. Just add all the tracepoints you want directly from awDebugger
- You don't need to remember to delete all those tracepoints before shipping the application to your customers
You can include values of variables and expressions in your tracepoints by enclosing the expressions between curly braces. For example: The value of GlobalRequest is {GlobalRequest}.
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