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Home » Language IDEs » C / C++ IDE (CDT) » Export Breakpoints Wizard requires selected breakpoints rather than enabled breakpoints(A simpler, easier to automate, quicker to use, approach to exporting breakpoints is considered.)

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Export Breakpoints Wizard requires selected breakpoints rather than enabled breakpoints [message #853093]

Sun, 22 April 2012 17:56

Leo L

Messages: 2
Registered: April 2012

Junior Member

bug nobug[ 1 vote ]
1.	bug	0 / 0%
2.	nobug	1 / 100%

Preface: I am posting this here rather than in Bugzilla because although it looks and smells like a bug to me, it is the first I post to the Eclipse community, so I would like some feedback first. TIA.

Here is the meat:

The doc for Export Breakpoints says:

"If the wizard is invoked from the breakpoints view and any breakpoints are selected, those same ones will be checked by default."

The current design requires several clicks to support the use case: "export the breakpoints currently being worked on".

The design can be simplified as follows:
- The Wizard is replaced with a simpler menu item "Export Enabled Bookmarks".
- The settings in the wizard are moved to a configuration tab under the "Debug" section. A default file name relative to the workspace is provided.
- A suitable message is printed to the status bar on invocation.

The advantages of the simpler design are:
* It supports the simple and common use case above with one click, and enables the menu item to be assigned a button or a keyboard shortcut requiring no further user interaction.
* It removes unnecessary confusion between "selected" and "enabled" breakpoints.
* It prevents users from inadvertently deleting their breakpoints by pressing "delete" or "backspace" thinking that they are in an editor panel when instead they are in the Breakpoints panel.
* It greatly simplifies the documentation and eliminates the two distinct cases.

A downside is:
* the more general but (IMHO) rather uncommon use case "export an unrelated collection of breakpoints" would require that collection of breakpoints to be the ones enabled.

Within the current design, perhaps all breakpoints, rather than none, should be selected by default in the "File Menu" invocation case described in the docs. Users by default have a non-empty set of breakpoints to export when they select "Export Bookmarks", and it commonly may be the entire set.

Thanks,
Leo.

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