Debugging

joejoe2010

Hello,

I'd like to execute OpenPetra in Debug-mode.
Is this possible with the command l in the OpenPetraServer-menu?

When I use the command l I get the error that Server and Client don't have the same version.
This happens although I created version.txt-files in the respective directories as explained here.

If I start nant startPetraClient I don't get this error (after creating the version.txt files)

Will it be possible using the l-command to debug the program and view the executed code in fe. SharpDevelop?

Do you have an idea?

Thank you

Joachim

pokorra

Christian might know more about the l option "l: load AppDomain for a fake Client (for debugging purposes only!)". I have never used that option myself.
When I think about it, it is probably a way to test the appdomains of the server, and avoids having to load a normal client when debugging the server. I guess this option is only useful for someone who works on the inner structure of the server. For functional changes we won't need that debugging option.

I have never debugged the server in SharpDevelop, I don't know how well that works with all the different Threads and AppDomains. I use TLogging.Log for displaying the values if I get a bug and try to solve it.
Debugging the client in SharpDevelop works, but you will have to increase the time-out values in the Server.config to quite big numbers.

The version.txt thing has changed in the past days, we now use developer versions, so no version 0.0.9 anymore. See http://discourse.example.com/t/new-nant-task-nant-patchdatabase-and-version-numbers/64 for information about this.

The version.txt is copied from db/patches to both Server/bin/Debug and Client/bin/Debug.

christiankatict

Hi Joachim,

Timo was right in his guess for PetraServer menu option "l: load AppDomain for a fake Client (for debugging purposes only!)" - it is mainly for testing AppDomain creation-tear down stuff, and for memory tracking purposes (one can quickly "connect" x Clients this way and see what it does to memory consumption of the PetraServer). It is hardly needed today since this is all working fine.
This option works no longer as it has a hard-coded value of "0.0.9.2" for the Client Version, and that won't work against a proper version number of the PetraServer as we have now. Since this menu option is hardly ever used I would leave it for the moment.

As for debugging the PetraServer: doing this using an IDE is problematic in most cases, as the PetraServer has many threads running in the background, some of which need to do regular work to keep everything up in the PetraServer. If a breakpoint is hit in the IDE, the IDE freezes the whole PetraServer process, incl. all Threads, and this will most likely affect a stable continuation after the developer chooses to continue after the breakpoint.
As Timo already mentioned, we get around that by using the TLogging.Log Method. It can be used for printing debug output to either the Console, the Log File or to both simultaneously.

joejoe2010

Hello,

thank you for the detailed answers.

Greetings

pokorra

On IRC we talked about some documentation for the directories in Git and the contents and purpose of the files.

A short documentation is now available here: sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/o ... _and_Rules

This still needs improving, and we will have at some point in the future the automatically generated documentation of the source code too, using the comments of each class and method and property.