[Tips] Conditional Breakpoints

I was wondering when I would finally use a conditional breakpoint to debug something. Happened today and it sure saved a lot of time. I am now a big fan of this very handy Servoy/Eclipse feature.

I was working on a Velocity report using Patrick's Velocity plugin:

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During coding and design I capped the data I was sending to the report to 10 records. When I was happy with the results I removed the record cap and boom, error:

[image unavailable: Picture 27] By adjusting the loop counter I soon figured out that the 43rd iteration of the loop was triggering the error. So now I needed to see the data produced in the 43rd iteration.

Solution: set a breakpoint in the loop, right-click on the breakpoint, select breakpoint properties, and set the breakbpoint to trigger on the 43rd hit count:

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Sure enough, 43rd iteration data object had an ampersand (&) character in one of the data points:

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Not having to click 43 times to get to this data was pretty nice. Enabled a fast identification of an issue and feature request off to Patrick.