VIATRA/Query/UserDocumentation/DebuggerTooling

The EMF-IncQuery debugger tooling aims to provide useful functionalities for the users, so that they can easily observe the contents of the EMF-IncQuery related artifacts when the program execution has stopped at a breakpoint. The plan is to provide three kinds of support for debugging:

• Possibility to explore the contents of the EMF instance models
• Navigation in the contents of EMF-IncQuery pattern matcher engines (matchers, matches, match parameters, etc)
• Navigation in the contents of EMF-IncQuery Rule Engines

The idea was described in the corresponding Bugzilla issue https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=405556.

The 0.8 version of EMF-IncQuery introduces support for the second point, the other two points will be implemented later. The debugger tooling is seamlessly integrated into the Eclipse Debug Perspective with additional views for the mentioned functionalities.

The features will be described with the emfxcel example (which is described in more details here https://incquery.net/incquery/examples/emfxcel). The example can be obtained from the GitHub repository https://github.com/ujhelyiz/EMF-IncQuery-Examples.

Debugging EMF-IncQuery engines

The latest version of EMF-IncQuery provides a new view which is called EMF-IncQuery Variables. This view is similar to the original Variables View (from the Debug Perspective), except that this one will display EMF-IncQuery pattern matcher engines when the application has halted at a breakpoint.

In this example we will place the net.istvanrath.emfxcel (note that this one will generate two additional plug-ins) and net.istvanrath.emfxcel.editor.xlsx plug-ins into the host Eclipse. Take these plug-ins and add them to an Eclipse Application Launch Configuration and start this configuration in Debug mode.

We will place some breakpoints into the Query Explorer related UI code for the sake of the example.

Additional remarks

• OSGi vs Eclipse app debugging