CF8 Debugger presentation
Today I gave a short presentation on the ColdFusion 8 debugger as part of a series of short presentations at the ColdFusion User Group of Central New York meeting in Syracuse, NY. You can download the presentation, the examples, and read a couple of tricks on setting up and using the CF8 debugger.
What can it do?
- Set breakpoints
- View and modify variable values
- Step through your code line by line
- Watch expressions
- Go where no debugging has gone before and making debugging RIA much easier!
What do I need
- Eclipse 3.1+ with CF8 extensions;
- A ColdFusion 8 installation; and
- A little time to set it all up.
How do I set this thing up?
- Before you do anything, read the Livedocs
- Enable RDS and Remote Debugging using CF Administrator
- Multi-instance installation: Modify the jvm.config as instructed
- Add the RDS Configuration in Eclipse
- Window > Preferences > ColdFusion > RDS Configuration
- Configure a new RDS Server
- Enter the description, hostname, and port. The port for me is 8300 because I am using the multiple server instances configuration; if you are using the standalone configuration and the built-in web server on your machine it is probably 8500. Finally, enter your RDS credentials and test the connection.
- Also, you can test connecting to the debug server right here. If you cannot connect to the debugger, make sure the debug server is running (since it is a separate process from ColdFusion) using the CF Administrator.
Add the debug profile in Eclipse
- Run > Debug…
- Select ‘ColdFusion Application’
- Click on the add button (as shown to the right)
- Enter the name, the debug home page URL, and select the RDS server you just set up.
- If the machine you are running Eclpse on, and the machine running ColdFusion 8 are not the same then enter mappings as necessary.
- Go grab some more coffee…
A couple of tricks
- View generated output (Window > Show View > Other; then ColdFusion > Debug output buffer view)
- Step-over is your friend. Only use step-in as needed - you can step into something you don’t want to; i.e. the <cfdump> tag is actually a CFM file that is located in WEB-INF\cftags\dump.cfm.
- Choose which variables to view (Preferences > ColdFusion > Debug Settings > Debugger scopes)
- Request timeout is effected by debugging. You might want to increase your request timeout in CF Administrator - if the CF server is only for development, of course.