Probably one of the most annoying issues that developers encounter is distributing programs to customers that contain unintentional ‘Debug’ statements. These are often left in from testing, and, with the pressure of deadlines to deliver, they are very easy to overlook.

In order to help alleviate this issue OpenInsight 10 implements a “$DEBUG” statement that you can use in place of the normal “Debug” statement: The difference here is that the debugger only triggers if the code is running on the same machine that it was compiled on, so if your program does manage to escape with a compiled $DEBUG statement it shouldn’t execute on other machines.

There are two variations of $DEBUG. The first is a simple “$DEBUG” statement like so:

Write Record To hFile, Key Else
   // Failed etc...
   $DEBUG
End

The second type of $DEBUG statement behaves in the same manner as described above, but also includes the ability to define a simple expression to test, and will only trigger the debugger if the test is met (This is similar to the way that the $ASSERT statement works). For example:

// Only debug if x is equal to 3
$DEBUG( x == 3 )

$DEBUG can be used in any version of OpenInsight 10 with the following caveats:

• From version 10.2.3 onwards the raw workstation name (e.g. “REVWS07” ) is used to test if the debugger should execute.
• Prior to this (version 10.2.2 and earlier), the entire contents of @station is used to test. The issue here is that @station usually includes the OpenInsight process ID (e.g. “REVWS07_45383” ) so it will only debug within the instance of OpenInsight that it was compiled on. This can be a little too restrictive unless you are willing to recompile your programs after restarting your application, hence the change for version 10.2.3 mentioned above.

Note that you can also disable $DEBUG statements when compiling, in which case the debug tests are never included in the object code.  To do this simply use the NODEBUG token with the #define statement like so:

#define NODEBUG

So, hopefully you can use the $DEBUG statement for your test debugging and have a smoother experience with your customers!