Debugging a Framework: Work Environment?

[afuchs]

Colleagues and Experts,

How do you go about debugging an extensive framework?

Background: I have a framework written for a rather complicated NLM-based project. The FW has to be maintained and extended on a regular basis. It also has bugs due to human condition.
Debugging a certain snippet of code used for, say, inserting an XML fragment (throw in a combobox with an xpath_eval function to read in values from an included list and similar niceties) means:
- Testing it in the editor
- opening Options > Preferences > Doc Association > choosing the framework > clicking your way into the action and the fragment
- editing the snippet
- clicking a bunch of OKs
- Testing again

Naturally, if you are stuck with an annoying entity and have to play with commas and brackets repetitiously, this procedure is exasperating. Also, while you are in the dialog with the snippet, you cannot access the XML input to look up anything (unless you also have it open in another editor, which is precarious).

The framework file can itself be opened in another window and edited without the dialogs, but that adds another level of complications and does not sit well with oXygen which, under certain conditions, does not register/apply changes. This is understandable.

So, how do you cope? Am I missing something obvious?

Thank you in advance,
Alexey

[Radu]

Hi Alexey,

In Oxygen 23.0 we added a new feature named a framework extension script. It's a special format of XML file in which you can specify details about the framework configuration without the need to use Oxygen's dialogs.

https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/ ... cript.html

My colleague Alex has a webinar about this:
https://www.oxygenxml.com/events/2021/w ... cript.html

For each action you can define its details in a special XML file type which is loaded by the extension script.
Also each time the framework extension script is modified and saved in Oxygen the framework configuration should be automatically reloaded by Oxygen so that you can test it more easily.

Regards,
Radu

[afuchs]

Thank you Radu! This does sound like something I'd been missing for a long time, will have a long attentive look at the webinar and the feature.