I sometimes have to remind myself what a useful tool the debugger that’s built into ColdFusion 8 is. Today I was debugging a fairly involved process that I’ve been writing that uses several CFCs including on CFC that contains methods to apply all the business rules to the particular process. I had a couple of values that weren’t getting set just correctly so I fired up a debugging session and started to work through the process flow to determine where I was losing the value in question.
After a while of debugging, I tried to set a few additional breakpoints and instead of showing the typical solid blue dot icon on the line where I set the breakpoint, the Eclipse debugger showed a dot with a question mark over it. I tried terminating and relaunching the debugging session, closing and restarting Eclipse and even setting a breakpoint in a different file–all to no avail. After checking the LiveDocs on Adobe.com, I found a support article that described the various icons that could be displayed as breakpoints and what they indicated.
This particular icon indicated that the copy in ColdFusion’s memory didn’t match what was in the editor. That led me to think that maybe I could clear the template cache in the CF Administrator and take care of the problem. Nope. So I poked around a little more and found two buttons I hadn’t noticed before. On the Debugger Settings page, there are buttons to stop and start the debugging server. Two quick clicks and I had restarted the debugging server. However, when I relaunched the debugging session in Eclipse, my icon returned to having the question mark. Turns out, all I had to do was go refresh the page in the browser. As useful as the debugger is, I think I’m going to have to spend a little time digging into understanding it better.