Taking a First Look at FusionDebug
Contents
1. command means to starts a debugging session In other software I ve seen this described as run or execute e Step Into A step is how you move from one line of code to the next There are three variations of the Step depending on what you want to do Step Into is probably what you ll use CFDJ SEPTEMBER 2006 E 10 cf 101 most of the time It means to step over this line of code but jump into any functions custom tags or CFC method calls that are called from the line of code you re on FusionDebug will open the file that you step into and stop at the first line of CFML code e Step Over Step Over is the exact opposite of Step Into It will execute the code in any function custom tag or CFC Method without opening it It moves right onto the next line It s a good idea to favor Step Over even on tags and expressions that wouldn t open a file for reasons TIl explain later e Step Return Step Return is used when youre inside a file that you stepped into It will execute the rest of the file and put you back to the place where the file was initially stepped into e Resume Resume means to continue execution of code until you run out of code or find another breakpoint e Terminate Terminate will end the debugging session with out completing your code s execution Usually I try to avoid using this These definitions should give you a good understanding of what features the debugger offers I ll move on to2. the FusionDe bug install and then an example Installing FusionDebug FusionDebug is created as an eclipse plug in and you ll need Eclipse to install it If you re already using CFEclipse or Flex Builder you must already have Eclipse installed If not you can download Eclipse from http www eclipse org It s as simple as extracting a zip file and running the Eclipse command There s no installer Speaking of CFEclipse which is another plug in for editing CFML code while you don t need to use it with FusionDebug if you want to try it I strongly recommend reading the ACME Apache ColdFusion MySQL Eclipse guide for detailed instructions http www stephencollins org acme on the install Even if you don t use Apache or MySQL look at just the final chapter on CFEclipse It s the best place to find detailed installation instructions on CFEclipse eh S Crib mueg an ruar conligur ations Specify Program Detal Sonligur atis 3 Apache Tonal Mamas MbAPrierids Eclipsa Application Fusicniehiig EN connect H source common F Genere Server H Garak Server BT Java Applet OA dave Application Ju Bunk Jy Sune Pligan Test f SWT Application Webserver Folder oi Project Devetopreant tues hy Prien Host lecalherst l P t 6000 E Eclipse folder structure mirrors websarver uncheck eo ignara folder structs P OF Server is on Windows uncheck if t
3. web lap read dace ea l gt ttitlesLatest Hacromedia News lt Cit le gt Linkbtep n reblogs Bac romedia com mrna meld tank Caeser iption Latest Eatroienia Wews lt Gescript ion ea adep Figure 4 Variables Panel and choosing Window gt Toggle Line Breakpoint or using Control Shift B or right click the line and choose Toggle Breakpoint You ll now see the breakpoint was set because of the blue dot in the grey bar to the left of the line number You can see the dot on line 15 of Figure 3 4 Open your favorite browser and launch the page you want to debug FusionDebug will intercept the page at the first break point Again note that you re not opening the page in the debugger but in whatever browser you want There is a blue arrow in the same grey bar to show you which template you are currently running This is called the Current Instruction Pointer 5 Click Step Over and you can step through the initialization code to watch the component being created Continue to click Step Over until you reach the init method of the RSSAg CFDJ SEPTEMBER 2006 gregator component Around line 75 you should see code like this lt cfset MyXMLVar xmlparse cfhttp filecontent gt 6 Click past the line that parses the XML content Now take a look at the variables tab shown in Figure 4 It should be in the upper right corner of the screen You can view all the variables available to the component T
4. you want the debugger to stop and can be any line with CFML code tags variables and so on After starting a debug session in FusionDebug you ll load the page you want to debug in the browser and FusionDebug will intercept it at your first breakpoint It can also intercept requests from pages and CFCs called from Flex AJAX Flash Remoting and Web services If there are no breakpoints the page will run as normal Breakpoints do not have to be in the page you request they can be located in CFCs custom tags includes or UDFs e Variables You already know what a variable is and how to use them If not read Creating Variables in CFML from CFDJ Vol 6 issue 2 http coldfusion sys con com read 43790 htm The variable list of FusionDebug shows all of the variables currently available to the template you are in at the point where youre debugging It will display local variables the variables scope URL Form request CGI and cookie variables as well as shared scope variables like ses sion and application and more e Expressions In the past I ve always referred to these as watch variables Expressions in its simplistic form are variables that you want to keep tabs on However the expres sion pane of FusionDebug will support any ColdFusion expression Perhaps you want to keep tabs on what the first item of a list is or the last element in an array You can do that with the Expression tab e Debug The debug
5. Fusion applica tions A little known and even lesser used feature in CF Studio was the availability of an interactive debugger Unfortunately the product was hard to configure and even harder to use so it never became a staple of the ColdFusion developer s toolbox Today the landscape of ColdFusion development is much dif ferent than it was in the CF Studio days In the old days most templates did multiple things and business logic code was implemented right next to display logic There was little thought of code encapsulation and templates were written the same way they were processed start at the top and work your way down Although CFML custom tags and User Defined Func tions provided facilities for encapsulating code it wasn t until ColdFusionJournal com ColdFusion Components were introduced that people started to apply advanced programming principles to their ColdFu sion applications Business logic is now put inside of CFCs Frameworks such as Model Glue and Mach II help us separate business logic and presentation code When a single ColdFu sion page loads it may be performing actions where the code is located across multiple files It isn t always easy to find the root of your errors FusionDebug is a tool that will help you find and correct your troublesome code I thought a good place to start might be to offer a definition of debugging concepts and definitions e Breakpoint A breakpoint is a spot in your code where
6. XALVar em Penk EEM Resgurces Cheek thas ColdFusion dicurmantation ba warih that gau re using tha careact Sy 4 E BPaesesk ths ifaw lode Nees be Lad o salias be oe ee hee E Tepes 978 Loaded MKEO LIZED Times 0 Dene E at Figure 2 MyFriend error new FusionDebug instance This will bring up a dialog similar to Figure 1 3 Enter a name for the FusionDebug instance This can be any thing you want it to be Specify the Web server folder I used the same folder as the project root for my Eclipse Project 4 Specify the host and port Note that the hostname can be localhost or indeed any server you have access to which has been configured as per the steps above Yes FusionDebug can debug remote servers The port is not your Web server port but the port you specified in the Java arguments It is 8000 by default If you followed my instructions above that didn t change 5 Select your other options In my case my CF Server is on Windows I want CF to compile pages in debug friendly mode and my Eclipse folder mirrors the Web server I have not yet experimented with the Detailed Java Information option sol left that unchecked These are explained in the User Guide Now you are good to go ready to debug You re First Debugging Session If you ve read my two articles on creating an RSS Aggregator you probably noticed that I found a bug between part one and part two The code I wrote in part 1 h
7. ce and select Debug or you can start the debug session by clicking the debug button from the toolbar You should see the session started up in the debug window top left 3 Open up a page in the project that you want to debug and set a breakpoint Note that if you open a file from the file system rather than from a project the debugger wont enable you to step through code With MyFriend I am opening up the scheduled task file schedultedtask sched uledtask cfm and putting a breakpoint on the first CF line of the page You can add a breakpoint by selecting the line CFDJ SEPTEMBER 2006 11 12 to heated ank TES Pie CH keo Seek e an e OK h i ee ee Qa ded poe E pr Lo NS E E EA eae TEE tO mp nis Ingai i Loew E died Sepa at A yaa ai a ona ardik a ARRAREN ELT epaia 3 Figure 3 FusionDebug Perspective ahw Eraponts Exgenssore mer Torpan ANTON Be MOMENTS Rud Ae n ERA Tir T Eo NRR 0ery Some 2 hoe Cire hae 7 DEMBHEAT M Document Sw LAR ML Document gt ee E TEPER Cothicon Component gt TOE 16 E His irifrn ompnent Ea RFN Eo VARIABLES i D APRUCATION REQUEST EON RNR OGE ITIP EE URL TORN COORIC CLIENT FLAS Pehmi version 1 0 encoding 0TF 0 al edt BOP mle https parl org eee 20 solnerde http poel org de elemente 1 1 7 oles rdf bttp Sew vidro thane raf abenet bttp
8. cf101 faking a rirst Look at FusionDebug The first interactive debugger for ColdFusion MX remember a particularly long weekend sitting in a computer lab for 12 hours and trying to write an assembler program on a VAX machine By Jeffry Houser that would read and write files A VAX is a big archaic mainframe computer It took many days but I was finally able to provide successful results Sometimes I think we take for granted that ColdFusion makes our lives extremely easy Even a novice CF developer should be able to figure out how to read and write files in under five minutes One tool that was integral to my success in the project was the use of an interactive debugger In my profession al career I ve used one for writing Pascal and Lotus Notes but moving to the Web world debuggers were noticeably vacant That is until now The folks who brought us Fusion Reactor have now brought us FusionDebug the first interactive debugger for ColdFusion MX Why Do You Need an Interactive Debugger What is an interactive debugger It is a tool that allows you to view the results of your code line by line You can see the value of variables queries CFC Instances and change the values of variables on the fly If you slip back into the old days of your memory you probably remember a product called ColdFusion Studio right Before CFEclipse ColdFusion Studio was the tool that almost everyone used for creating Cold
9. chance to preview it and it contains a lot of information beyond the scope of this article The product is available as a free 20 day trial Pricing starts at US 299 with an 10 discount currently avail able with the code CFCOMMUNITY Volume discounts are also available The company offers free support at support fusion reactor com The RSSAggregator code is downloadable from my blog at www jeffryhouser com I appreciate all the feedback I ve received from it Thanks for reading and let me know what you think I ll see you next month lt amp About the Author Jeffry Houser has been working with computers for over 20 years and in Web development for over 8 years He owns a consulting company and has authored three separate books on ColdFusion most recently ColdFusion MX The Complete Reference McGraw Hill Osborne Media jeff instantcoldfusion com ColdFusionJournal com
10. e root elements are different Where would the debugger have helped To debug this code inside a component I m changing code It s one thing to adda variable output or cfdumps so you can view variables Those are easy enough to comment out later It s quite another to have to change code such as the output parameter from false to true I don t want to have different code for production versus devel opment That defeats the purpose and allows too much margin for error How many of these output attributes have I forgotten to change back I have no idea The problem gets worse when you are dealing with nested components because you have trickle back up to the top of the tree and set all outputs to true Still another situation occurs with code within CFSILENT which I would have to find and remove to see any debugging output These are situations where an interactive debugger offers benefit To get to the root of the problem I don t have to change any code This is how I ll debug this in FusionDebug 1 First I m going to open up the project in Eclipse and switch to the debug perspective You can switch perspectives using Window gt Open Perspective and selecting Debug You should see something similar to Figure 3 Again all this is de scribed very well in the User Guide for those new to Eclipse 2 Next start a debugging session You can re open the debug window see Figure 2 select your Debug instan
11. he CF Server is on Linux or Unis i Compile CF pages in debug Friendy mode while Fusion fries is conmched T Cespley wery detailed Jaws information Java Cipert Mode Figure 1 FusionDebug Configuration Window CFDJ SEPTEMBER 2006 There are two ways to install FusionDebug using a manual process or an automated one The automated process uses the Find and Install Updates feature built into Eclipse This is documented in the FusionDebug user guide which at the time of this writing is available at http www fusion reactor com fusiondebug helpDocs FusionDebug_User_Guide pdf I m going to step you through the process of the manual install so while youre at it you may as well download the files for a manual install The zip archive includes the PDF documenta tion at plugins com intergral fusionreactor debug core_1 0 0 FusionDebug User manual pdf No matter which way you install I recommend reading through the guide Plugins for Eclipse are located in a subdirectory of your Eclipse installation named plugins You can unzip the download to the plugins directory if you wish Restart Eclipse so the plugin is found If you don t wish to extract into your Eclipse directory unzip somewhere else and copy the directories manually There are two directories you need to put in eclipseinstall plugins com intergral fusionreactor debug core_1 0 0 and com intergral fusionreactor debug ui_1 0 0 Restar
12. he one we care about most is the local function variable that holds the XML The first time through the loop you ll see that the XML is in proper RSS 2 format The second time through you ll notice it uses RDF instead of XML Drill ing down you ll realize that the items are different in the RDF format than they are in the RSS format And that is the root of the problem The bug was easily solved by adding an if statement ex plained in the previous article to decide which RSS format to use and how to access the item array Both debugging methods can bring you to the same end result but I personally find the use of FusionDebug to be much more elegant I mentioned near the start to favor Step Over versus Step Into even on tags or function calls that don t open a file The reason is that being a Java debugger Eclipse will try to step through the underlying Java code FusionDebug is configured to hide that by default but the execution of the tag function will take longer than if you d used Step Over What Next The folks who created FusionDebug created some Captivate videos to help demonstrate what FusionDebug can do and some uses of it It is one thing to read about how to do things it is another to see it done so I suggest checking them out at http www fusion reactor com fusiondebug gettingStarted html Charlie Arehart wrote a tips and tricks article for this edition of ColdFusion Developer s Journal I ve had a
13. t Eclipse and you should be good to go Yes the install really is as easy as copying files Configuring ColdFusion and FusionDebug Your next step is to set up ColdFusion to allow for debugging requests In reality you re setting up the Java server which un derlies your ColdFusion installation and not making any direct changes to ColdFusion settings You need to change the argu ments that are used when launching the JVM In most ColdFu sion installations you ll be using JRun and the JVM settings are located in a jvm config file For Windows installations this file is located in the CF install directory under runtime bin For Unix it s just in bin under your CF install directory If you are using CF in any sort of multiserver configuration your location may vary slightly Before editing the file you may want to save a copy of the current file in case anything goes wrong with the one line edit I m about to describe Find the java args line of the config file and remove this argument e XX UseParallelGCc Then add these options e Djava compiler NONE e Xnoagent e Xdebug e Xrunjdwp transport dt_socket server y Suspend n address 8000 Make sure that all the options are on the same line For ease you can copy these lines out of the FusionDebug documenta tion Note the port 8000 that s used If you know that port to be used is already in your system choose a number that s not in use lIl e
14. ttp coldfusion sys con com read 235976 htm supported only RSS 2 It turns out that the Macromedia XML News Aggregator http weblogs macro media com mxna was only providing ColdFusionJournal com an RSS 1 0 feed The XML was different in each feed In part 2 http coldfusion sys con com read 264745 htm I described the error and explained the fix I thought I d step you through the process I used to diagnose and fix the problem without Fusion Debug and then step you through the process using FusionDe bug In my test database for the MyFriend RSS aggregator I have two RSS URLs One points to my blog and the other to MXNA When trying to process the MXNA URL by manually loading the scheduled task I was seeing an error as shown in Figure 2 I wasn t sure why I was receiving the error since all RSS feeds should contain an item as part of the channel right The first thing I did was add a cfdump tag to see why xmlroot channel item did not exist I reloaded and got nothing insert two head scratches and one look of utter confusion here Why wasn t I seeing any debug output It turns out the CFFUNCTION had its OUTPUT attribute set to false No output means no output and the cfdumps weren t being sent back to the browser I changed that attribute to true and reloaded Okay now with the cfdump I could drill down into the XML and see the problem Items AKA Blog Posts are stored differently in RSS 1 vs RSS 2 And th
15. xplain its use shortly Save the file and restart your ColdFusion services If it fails to start revert to the saved copy from above and study your changes to make sure you followed the instructions carefully The final step in getting yourself set up is to create an ColdFusionJournal com instance of FusionDebug that points to the server you set up for debugging 1 Load up Eclipse and select a project you want to debug with If you don t have any Eclipse projects see the FusionDebug User Guide for more information on creating one for the first time Select Debug from the Run menu 2 Select FusionDebug from the menu and Click New to create a bre iF Lee rier mil while Prans sing request Mogdii Herein 2j 2 0 x ee E PE O kenthose lnn ichak ash ScherkdedTar ELUHE a 4 Coca D cise E feee iat E namiar E Melinae g buina 3 ie Tj tode T nes The web site you are accessing has experienced an unexpected error Please contact the website administrator Erri Ori Urred W E a Pre Ices sing Reg yest Element XMLROOT CHANNEL IT EM is undefined in MYXMLVAR The bed occured mn CP rojecths Development htdocs My F riende components ASsAqgregator che line 82 BO DL lt Cfif H7XNLVAE kml got colnem is r5 ceteet Itemirray iyXMLVar welroot channel item BS i tleee lt efelseif AyXaLVac xml root timings i edt BOF Ba tefat Ceemireay AY
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