Technotes

Although this won’t necessarily cause a problem for you, you need to be careful of when stepping through code inside a CFLOCK or CFTRANSACTION as you could negatively impact other threads or users. In the case of CFLOCK, you could hold a lock that could hang up others trying to get the same lock. (Locks are a subject of frequent confusion, but further discussion is beyond the scope of this article.) In the case of CFTRANSACTION, you could hold a lock that holds up others trying to access the database you’re processing since CFTRANSACTION (driven by its ISOLATION attribute) can tell the database to prevent other reads or writes during the life of the transaction.

If your CFML page experiences an error, then CFMX will return an error page to the browsing user but will no longer provide the debugging information that FD requires. As such, FusionDebug will just appears to stop debugging that request because the request has stopped abruptly.

There are some special cases where FusionDebug requires the files to have the exact capitalisation, even on file systems where this shouldn’t be an issue. Please make sure that the Application.cfm and OnRequestEnd.cfm are named exactly as shown here in Eclipse and on your ColdFusion server. (capital A on Application.cfm and Capital O, R and E on OnRequestEnd.cfm)

If a breakpoint fires several times for the same page (template or CFC) then you may see a highlight in the code view for every page rather than just for the currently selected one. This is a known issue in Eclipse. For more information please see the associated Eclipse ticket.

CFEclipse perspective does not have a mapping to the CTRL-SHIFT-B key to Toggle Breakpoint by default. You can change this by adding the debugging command to the CFEclipse perpective as follows:

1. Open the CFEclipse Perspective (Window->Open Perspective)
2. Select the Windows->Customize Perspective Menu option to open the Customize Perspective Dialog
3. Select the Command Tab
4. Check ON the Breakpoints and Debug Command groups from the Available command groups
5. Click OK

Alternatively you can click on the line of code where you need a breakpoint, and then select the right mouse-click menu. Select the menu option Toggle Line Breakpoint. You can also double-click in the ruler at the left hand side of the screen to set a breakpoint.

There are a number of ways in which you can set a breakpoint:

1. Double click in the ruler at the left hand side of the screen next to the line you want to set the breakpoint on
2. Right mouse click in the ruler next to the line you want to set the breakpoint on and select Toggle Breakpoint
3. Click on the line of code in the editor and then select the right mouse click menu option Toggle Line Breakpoint

Note that the CTRL-SHIFT-B shortcut will not work when using CFEclipse.

If you wish to move your FusionDebug license to a different machine, first uninstall FusionDebug from where it is currently installed and install into onto the new machine.

Then select the Windows->Preferences menu to open the Preferences dialog. Click on the FusionDebug node and then on the License node. From here you can upload your license key and activate it.

FusionDebug discovers the source code to display though the use of mappings between server folders and Eclipse Projects/Folders that you enter in the FusionDebug configuration. Currently FusionDebug does not support RDS.

FusionDebug is only capable of connecting to one ColdFusion MX instance at a time. You must terminate your current session by clicking on the disconnect icon. (Also see “Terminate” on page 13 of the User Guide).

If you want to debug multiple pages on the same server, you do not need to connect FusionDebug to ColdFusion again; simply set a breakpoint in the page you want to debug and run that page. FusionDebug can debug multiple page at the same time.