Developing in the debugger context

Dear community,

I stumbeld upon some aspect of developing ABAP in eclipse which just boosted my efficiency which I did not think of at all:

It often happens to me (particularly during maintenance) that I execute a test (pereferrable a unittest) and find a constellation of data for which I need to adapt my code. My practice was to set a breakpoint, execute the test, note down the relevant variables on either a piece of paper or some other medium (notepad), then let the code execute (or abort 😉 ) and then to correct the artifact.

It often occurred to me that I forgot to note down some other context information which was just available at runtime, so I had to re-execute the test. Particularly after having noted the fact that some information’s missing after starting to correct the code, this is tedious: Since I removed the breakpoint previously and cannot set a breakpoint in the inactive source, I had to undo (comment) my changes, … you know what I mean.

With AiE, the debugger starts in a new view in a new perspective – but what’s more important: The other views share the context. This has the effect that while developing, you can access the context of the current debugger-session – and you can inspect the content of all variables in your ABAP editor!

Don’t get what I mean? Have a look at the screenshot:

My personal comclusion: Resist terminating the debugger while correcting (but don’t tell your sys-admins 😉 )

Cheers,

Oliver