JetBrains Zone - Comments for "Set Conditional Breakpoints in IDEA"

Eclipse Conditional

bryanw_dzone — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:56:50 -0500

Eclipse Conditional Breakpoints:

Right click on the little blue ball in your editor that represents the breakpoint for that line of code.
Select "Breakpoint Properties".
Check the "Enable Condition" checkbox.
Type your condition in the text are below it.

That's the basics of it. R.J. Lorimer wrote an interesting post a while back about using this feature to dynamically add debug printlns at runtime.

Any Eclipse or Netbeans

mstine — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:09:03 -0500

Any Eclipse or Netbeans users have a HOWTO for this one? It would be great if we could get a slice across all of the major IDE's.

And here is how you do the

gevatron — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:35:46 -0500

And here is how you do the same thing if you are using JDeveloper:

http://blogs.oracle.com/shay/2006/12/22#a301

Yes Mike, the performance

ann — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:16:47 -0500

Yes Mike, the performance may suffer when you use conditional breakpoints. It will definitely depend on the complexity of the structure being iterated and the expression that defines your condition.

Technically, IntelliJ IDEA will stop at the breakpoint each time and evaluate the expression. If the condition is not met, it will resume the Java machine until the next breakpoint.

Thus you have to use this feature thoughtfully, in order to get the most benefit out of it ;-)

What's the performance

okidoky — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:27:44 -0500

What's the performance impact when a condition is not met? For instance, if I add this in a loop that process a two dimensional array of pixels, and I want the break point to hit when a pixel has an alpha value greater then 50%, I don't want the debugger to delay processing each pixel by an x number of miliseconds.

Does IDEA compile the expression?

Or perhaps it replaces the class with a modified version using hotswap? THAT would certainly have a minimum performance impact, because it'd be just like having written the condition right inside the method, with no actual breakpoints happening unless the condition is met.

How does it do it, and also, how do the other IDE's do it?