Re: [xsl] Is there any XSLT debugger stepping in subexpressions of a complex XPath expression? (Was: Re: [xsl] XPath (and other W3C drafts))

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2009-12-16 09:11 -0800, Dimitre Novatchev wrote:
> To shift to a what I consider a very important, related topic:
>
> It has been many years since I have adopted writing complete programs
> as one XPath expressions, something like this:
> ...
> Now this has been facilitated even further by providing "let
> expressions" in XPath 2.1. I will never have to need to define a
> separate xsl:variable whose value is a sequence -- this was not
> possible without having let expressions in XPath.
>
> However, I cannot find adequate debugger support for this style of
> programming.

Have you considered simply wrapping sub-expressions with trace() 
since trace() simply returns the first argument as its return value?

> The whole program above is treated as one single statement

I tell my students this is a safe way to debug their complex 
expressions without disturbing the logic of the XPath expression 
(except for injecting the syntax)

I hope this helps.

. . . . . . . . . . . Ken

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