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RE: Debugger not recognizing code changes

by Dave Bender-2 :: Rate this Message:

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I found the cause of this problem. I’ll see if I can explain it for posterity (and the amusement of people smarter than me):

The gist of it is that there were duplicate class files in the classpath. They appear to have gotten there because … and here’s where I get a little lost … the <project folder>/web folder contained what looks like the contents of the application’s .war file from the previous IDE. That includes WEB-INF/classes with all the classes.

When NetBeans was building the project, I guess it was cleaning out the dist directory, compiling my classes (with the current content), then copying over all the stuff from the .web/ folder, which included the older versions of the classes from the ./web/WEB-INF/classes directory.

Once I removed all the .class files from the .web/ directory things started working again as expected.

Dave

From: nbusers-return-122928-dbender=umn.edu@... [mailto:nbusers-return-122928-dbender=umn.edu@...] On Behalf Of Dave Bender
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2008 3:23 PM
To: nbusers@...
Subject: [nbusers] Debugger not recognizing code changes

I'm getting some odd behavior from the debugger in a large NetBeans 6.1 web application that was imported from JBuilder. The NetBeans debugger doesn't seem to recognize when I've changed code. It will continue to stop on blank lines where a previous breakpoint was set, and it marks as "Broken Breakpoint" lines that have new, valid code on them.

It's like me and the debugger (or the debugger and Tomcat) are working off two copies of the code -- one version, that Tomcat is running, is stuck the way it was; the other is in the NetBeans editor and can be edited to my heart's content (though no changes are reflected back to Tomcat.)

For example, if I have a servlet class that runs fine, I can put a breakpoint at a particular line. When I clean/build and run in debug mode, the program will stop at that line, as expected. Then I stop tomcat, stop debugging and add a blank line where my breakpoint was. NetBeans properly advances the marker to the next line. But when I run the app again in debug mode, it stops at the blank line, then stepping forward, it advances, but it's off by one line.

It behaves this way even after I exit NetBeans and restart after making a change. Rebooting doesn't change the behavior. Neither does eating Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream, though that improved my spirits. I've also managed to get this to happen on two different PCs, so whatever happened is repeatable.

Is there something amiss that will correct this behavior? It's pretty much a show-stopper since effectively, I can't edit code. What things can I check to track down the cause of this?

Any help would be appreciated. I'm using Netbeans 6.1 on Windows with Tomcat 6.0.1

Dave

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