Breakpoints

One of the key features of xTrace is the ability to define breakpoints. A breakpoint is a place or a condition in your code at which you want to pause execution.

Instead of stepping through most of your application before getting to the point of interest, simply define a breakpoint and run the application until the breakpoint condition is satisfied.

xTrace supports various types of breakpoints:

Action Block Breakpoint

If you know which action block you want to trace, simply add an action block breakpoint and tracing will start when that action block is entered. This means that you do not have to disable trace for every intermediate action block that you are not interested in tracing.

Value Breakpoint

Use a value breakpoint to start tracing when an attribute is assigned a certain value. For example RETURN_CODE = -20. A very powerful feature of value breakpoints is the ability to use wild cards, for example *.*.*.WORK.CODE would refer to any view of an attribute work code in any action diagram.

Entry/Exit Breakpoint

You may want to stop on every entry and/or exit from an action block. Exit breakpoints allow you inspect the views after the last statement has been executed.

Statement Breakpoint

If you want to stop every time you reach a certain statement in an action block you can add a statement breakpoint.

Model Breakpoint

If you are using component based development you may execute operations from a number models.

If you only want to trace action blocks from your own model, simply check 'Only trace current model' and action blocks from other models will not be traced even if trace support has been generated into the code.