Setting breakpoint w/Eclipse PDT

Question

I am SOOOOO discouraged. This seems so simple, but being a complete novice in Drupal and Eclipse PDT I have absolutely no idea where to look. My DAYS of searching seems to indicate that I am the only person on the planet with this problem.

Eclipse IDE for PHP Developers (1.2.1.20090918-0703) WampServer Version 2.0 Apache 2.2.11 PHP 5.2.9-2 MySQL 5.1.33 Drupal 6.15 xDebug php_xdebug-2.0.5-5.2.dll

I setup my project in Eclipse to point to my Drupal directory (C:\wamp\www\drupal-6.15). I start the debugger (xdebug) and I stop at the first line of code. I can step through the code line by line -- so I think I am in the debugger, and when I terminate the app, I see the xdebug termination message in the tab heading.

But I cannot set a breakpoint in any of the PHP code files -- specifically a new .module file.

When I right click in the breakpoint column on the left in index.php (main) I see "toggle breakpoint" and the little blue circle next to the line of code...so I think I know how to set a breakpoint. But when I try to set a breakpoint in my .module, I see a menu that asks me to "add a bookmark" and no option to set a breakpoint.

Why can I not set a breakpoint in this file? Is my project path not set up correctly? Do I need to amend my include path? I can't get Eclipse to recognize even core modules not just site/all modules. I've seen posts about "importing" files into the project, and making sure the correct php.ini file is used for configuring xdebug. I'm lost.

There are so many posts about using Eclipst PDT and xDebug and they all end with "have fun debugging" or "just set some breakpoints and off you go" -- but what if you CAN'T set a breakpoint? Any ideas about where Eclipse is lost? Where in Eclipse can you get a list of files it has included in its build?

I think I just need to know understand why Eclipse cannot find these modules within the project (i.e. drupal application) path to allow me to set breakpoints. Then I think I can carry on. So discouraging...

Thanks to anyone listening.

Answer 1

Breakpoints are tricky in PDT projects:

• for php files, you need to be careful

One thing that gets me a lot is that there a lot of "invalid" places where you set breakpoints. You can put the dot there in the IDE, but the debugger won't stop at it:

• blank/non-code lines
• on switch statements
• in some types of callbacks (for example, preg_replace)

But for breakpoints in .module files, this should be related to a setup issue.

I made the following changes to my setup:

• Upgraded from php 5.2.1 to php 5.2.3
• Installed the Zend debugger client in Eclipse/PDT (theoretically not necessary from what I understand, but I decided to give it a try)
• Made sure that the Drupal files were fully imported into my project, not just referenced as include libraries.

I did that last step after I created a tiny test case and discovered that I could get the debugger to stop on a breakpoint in an externally included file only if that file was imported into the project, not if it was referenced as part of an include library directory.
To my mind this seems like a bug - the debugger could certainly see that the files in the include library directories were source files and it let me set breakpoints in them, so it seems that it should stop on them.
(For comparison from a separate (java) IDE, IntelliJ will let you define breakpoints in jar files as long as you tell it where the source is. Once you've defined it, it will stop on it.)

I think it was principally that last step that did the trick, so I'd suggest that anyone else with a similar problem make sure that isn't an issue in their setup first, and then try the other steps.

Answer 2

Thanks for the tip. I think I had seen your similar response in another post somewhere.

Actually, the solution for me was to make sure to include all of the standard Drupal file extensions in the Eclipse file associations preferences: Preferences->General->Content Types->Text->PHP Content Type. The defaults are various *.php, *.phpX, *.phtml extensions, but not the extensions used in Drupal modules -- *.info, *.inc, *.module, *.install, etc.

Simple and obvious once you figure it out. I'm surprised with all the Eclipse-xDebug-Drupal setup instructions out there that this had not shown up. Lots of details about matching project paths with server paths, but nothing about this.

I hope my struggle helps someone. I did learn a lot about Eclipse PDT along the way :-). Good luck.