Introduction to the ADF Debugger
- by Shay Shmeltzer
Not that you'll ever need this blog entry - after all there are never bugs in the code that YOU write. But maybe one day one of your peers will ask you for help debugging their ADF application so here we go...
One of the cool features of JDeveloper and ADF is the ADF Debugger - a way to debug the declarative pars of Oracle ADF. The debugger goes beyond your regular Java debugger and shows you in a clear way specific information related to Oracle ADF - things like where are you in the taskflow/region hierarchy, what is in your various scopes, what is the value of a specific EL and much more.
However, from the number of posts on OTN where people are saying "I placed a System.out.println() to see what the value was...", it seems that not many are familiar with the power of the debugger.
So here is a short demo that shows you some aspects of the debugger such as:
Setting breakpoints on various ADF artifacts
The ADF structure window
The ADF Data window
The EL Evaluater window
Want to learn more about debugging ADF applications - I highly recommend that you go back in time to 2009 and attend Steve Muench's OOW presentation about ADF debugging. Can't travel in time yet? Then the second best option is to look at his very clear ADF Debugging Slides, which were the inspiration to the above demo.