Re: [xsl] Managing debug logging in complex transforms: what do people do?

[Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 24 March 2014 18:42, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 24 Mar 2014, at 17:31, Eliot Kimber <ekimber@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> For whatever reason I find using interactive debugging unhelpful for
>> debugging XSLT processing (but I couldn't code a line of Java without it).
>
> That's my experience too, I have never been sure why the difference.

That's interesting... I use oXygen daily and get on well with its
debugger - the click back feature (where you click on a node in the
result and it highlights the line in the xslt and context node in the
source xml that created it) is a killer feature (I don't know if it's
common or unique to oxygen).  Equally, putting break points in the
xslt and then clicking around the call stack to see how you got there
can be a quick way of diagnosing issues.

Lazy evaluation does seem to cause a few problems, you don't step
through code but jump around it as various variables get evaluated,
then for some reason you are past where you wanted go.  And the PE/EE
versions of Saxon don't seem to work as well as HE - the click-back
feature for example doesn't work.  Maybe George can help here?

It is still a way from a java debugger, but it's miles better than
old-school message output.

How do other xslt ides compare?


-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com