Blog | FusionDebug - Part 11

FusionDebug doesn’t require pages to be launched ‘inside’ the debugger. Simply run your page using a web browser (or Flex, Flash Remoting, Ajax, or web service client) as normal and the debugger will suspend it correctly when a breakpoint is hit.

Here is an outline of how to get started quickly debugging. It is recommended to read the FusionDebug manual to get further information about debugging ColdFusion:

• Create a New FusionDebug Launch (Select the Run->Debug… menu and right click on FD, select New)
• Enter the IP address of the server
• Select the mappings table and enter a mapping to tell FD where the Eclipse code is placed on the CF server
• Click Debug on the Launch Configuration
• Go to the FusionDebug Perspective
• Set a breakpoint on a line of CF code (double click in the ruler next to the line of code)
• Run your page in a web browser
• FusionDebug should hit the breakpoint and highlight the line of code
• Press Step Into (F5) or Step Over (F6)
• You’re debugging!

This can be caused by one of two things. You can check this by starting ColdFusion from the DOS command line.

• The port configured in the jvm.config (default: 8000) is already in use. Please try a different port. If this does not help, it could also be that multiple servers are trying to start at once; please see this the linked technotes.

• dt_socket.dll cannot be found. FusionDebug needs to connect to a debug transport called dt_socket. Could you please confirm for me that dt_transport.dll is in the folder C:/CFusionMX7/runtime/jre/bin. If it is then the C:/CFusionMX7/runtime/jre/bin folder is not being picked up by your windows path. You could solve this in one of two ways:
  • Add C:/CFusionMX7/runtime/jre/bin to your windows PATH variable
  • Copy dt_socket.dll to a folder in your windows PATH (e.g. C:\Windows)

Starting CF from the DOS Command Line (make sure the CF Service is stopped first):

• Open a DOS window
• CD to C:/CFusionMX7/bin
• Type: cfstart
• ColdFusion should start and you should get an error message if it doesn’t

This is a known problem with Eclipse 3.1 and doesn’t occur in 3.2. We recommend you upgrade your Eclipse Platform. As of writing, the Eclipse 3.2 version of Flex Builder 2 is only available as a plugin.

There are several ways to remove a breakpoint.

1. Double click directly on the breakpoint
2. Right mouse click on the breakpoint and select the Toggle Breakpoint Menu item
3. Click on the line in your code which has a breakpoint (actually on the line, not in the border) and then Right-click and select “Toggle Line Breakpoint” from the menu.
4. Open the Breakpoints tab, right click on one of the breakpoints listed and select Remove from the menu.

Also note that you can disable breakpoints on the Breakpoints tab by right mouse clicking on the breakpoint and selecting the Disable option. This causes the breakpoint to no longer fire, but the breakpoint definition is kept in the breakpoint tab so that you can Enable it again later, without having to find the location in the code and reinserting the breakpoint.

“Perspectives” is the name Eclipse gives to different window layouts.

The Debug perspective contains a layout optimized for debugging code such as Java. The FusionDebug perspective has been optimized for debugging ColdFusion applications.

You typically change to the FusionDebug perspective when you start a ColdFusion debugging session, and change back to an Editing perspective such as the CFEclipse perspective when you are writing code.

You can change perspective by selecting the Windows->Open Perspective menu option.

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.