Call toString() on user objects to help with debugging

[robinrodricks]

This is a feature request, based on an idea from Visual Studio.

In the image below I've shown the same set of objects in VS and FD. As you can see the VS debugging view is very friendly and makes complex object hierarchies easy to understand.

So how does it work? The VS debugger calls ToString() on objects to show developer-provided text in the debug panels, like [Image 64x128]. Only if the object does not support this, then it uses a default rendering like [Image].

The image above uses the following C# code:

internal class TestImage {

	public int Height;
	public int Width;

	public override string ToString() {
		return "[Image " + Width + "x" + Height + " in RGB]";
	}
}

Can we have a similar feature in FlashDevelop?

What I propose : FD debugger should try to call "toString()" on the class object if the method exists. If the method does not exist, then it should fallback to the default rendering.

[SlavaRa]

How it should work for that code?

class Foo {
	public function new() {}
	
	var i:Int = 0;
	
	public function toString():String {
		return "[Foo, i: " + (i++) + "]";
	}
}

[robinrodricks]

Obviously it will execute the function many more times than required. It would appear wrong but at least in genuine use cases it would work properly!

[Neverbirth]

Flash debugger is not the nicest thing out there... I think this would bring extreme performance problems for some cases. There is for example issue #181 and this would make things even worse.

This is fully possible, of course, and could be enabled with a setting.