Object tree in the evaluate dialog

Hari Krishna Dara <[email protected]> Mon, 11 Oct 2004 12:12:34 -0700
Newsgroups gmane.comp.java.jswat.devel
Message-ID <[email protected]>
While evaluating in the Expression Evaluator dialog, I would like to
be able to expand the result object for the fields and such. This is a
standard feature in many debuggers, and as far as I can see, JSwat
already has all the required code. In my initial investigation, it
looks like we can expose some of the classes in LocalsPanel.java as
public classes and use them in the EvaluateAction.java to show the
result as a tree instead of just showing the toString() value. We
should still be able to show the toString() value in the root node, to
get best of both worlds.

The only draw back I can see is when the result is a String value.
When the text is multiline and long (such as when holding the content
of a script or HTML in a variable), currently, you can select all and
copy paste into another application to insevstigate further. May be we
can support copying any tree node (including the root, which will have
the toString() value) for this to be possible.

I would appreciate any feedback on this enhancement. Please let me
know if anyone is already working on it, or thought about it before.
Otherwise, I would like to make this enhancement myself.

Thank you,
Hari