Hi All,
Most of you have probably see the fast and furious emails going on
about issue #623. I wanted to drop you a quick note on how to debug a
failing cactus test.
First you need to have tomcat setup to run in debug mode and then
attach to it via your IDE. That process is explained in an old post
on my blog;
http://bill.dudney.net/roller/page/bill/20040210
the content is a bit dated but it works like a champ for tomcat 5.5.9.
Once you are connected to tomcat running in the debug-able vm you can
set breakpoints in the server side code (such as ValueBindingImpl for
bug #623) and merrily debug away with a quick simple means to repeat
the buggy code (i.e. no more wading through a JSP to invoke the buggy
code). You can run the cactus tests in Eclipse as JUnit tests so it
appears that everything is happening right in eclipse but half of the
code is running on the server.
You have to deploy the cactus tests into your running version of
tomcat for all this to work. I was thinking of adding build stuff to
accomplish that as well if there is enough interest. In the mean time
you can simply startup tomcat as described in the blog post and copy
the cactus-app.war file into the auto deploy directory (usually
webapps) then connect Eclipse to the debug-able jvm running tomcat
(also described earlier in the blog post). You also need to specify
the following property;
cactus.contextURL=http://localhost:8080/cactus-app
You can specify this in your launch specification in Eclipse or
create a cactus.properties file in the Eclipse output folder (where
the projects compiled classes end up). The file should contain a
single line defining cactus.contextURL. Cactus will look for this
property either specified on the command line or in a file called
'cactus.properties' in the class path so either way will work. I find
it easier to manually create the file in the Eclipse output directory
but do what you like :)
Anyway I should probably put this on the Wiki but its too manual IMO
right now. If there is enough interest I'll generalize it so that you
can deploy the cactus tests from the build file.
TTFN,
-bd-
