Posts Tagged ‘eclipse’

How to configure Eclipse to debug Alfresco java webscript code

How to configure Eclipse to debug Alfresco java webscript code

NOTE: It is assumed, that Eclipse environment has been configured to work with Alfresco SDK. If it’s not true the configuration process has been described here: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_SDK_3.4#Set_Eclipse_Compiler_Compliance_Level_to_6.0.

1. Select: Run menu -> Debug configurations…
2. Create new configuration for ‘Remote Java Application’
3. In ‘Project’ field select ‘home’ project (presumably your webscript project), which you want to debug (but it is also possible to debug code from Alfresco core outside selected project)
4. In ‘Connection properties’ set Tomcat server IP address and debug port you defined earlier.

NOTE: It’s advised against to use ‘localhost’ instead of IP address on Windows because of hosts file issues.

5. Click Apply, Debug
6. If everything went correct you shouldn’t get any message.
7. Switch to debug perspective
8. You should see something like this:

Proper screen from eclipse debug perspective

Proper screen from eclipse debug perspective


In case of debug session disconnection (eg. Tomcat restart) you may reconnect to it using Relaunch option:
Reconnecting to debugger

Reconnecting to debugger


9. Now you can normally set breakpoints and trace code execution of your webscript or other Alfresco SDK projects. A good test is setting a breakpoint in org.alfresco.web.bean.LoginBean at line
“FacesContext context = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();” – breakpoint should be caught at Alfresco Explorer login attemp.

NOTE: You may get following error message: “Unable to install breakpoint in org.evolpe.webscripts.XMLwebs due to missing line number attributes. Modify compiler options to generate line number attributes.
Reason:
Absent Line Number Information”

Missing line info window

Missing line info window

CAUSE&SOLUTION: To debug your own webscripts or other code it’s essential to enable code line number information in the compiler. If you use ant, set debug=”true’ parameter in javac task.

How to configure tomcat to debug instance of Alfresco on Windows and Linux will be described soon in my next articles.;)

I get “Unable to locate the Javac Compiler” when trying to build using IAM Maven Eclipse plugin.

Problem:
When trying to build maven project using IAM under Eclipse I get an error like this:


"Unable to locate the Javac Compiler in:C:\\Program
Files\\Java\\jre6\..\\lib\\tools.jar
Please ensure you are using JDK 1.4 or above and
not a JRE (the com.sun.tools.javac.Main class is required).
In most cases you can change the location of your Java
installation by setting the JAVA_HOME environment variable"

,nevertheless I have proper installation of newest Java JDK and JAVA_HOME is properly set.
The problem never occured before.

Solution:

I know two possible causes of that problem:

1. Eclipse uses its own JRE to start, and IAM does the same. You’ve recently installed a new maven plugin and it requires JDK.
You can force Eclipse to start using directly given Java VM by starting it that way from command line:

“X:\\path\to\\eclipse\\eclipse.exe -vm JAVA_JDK_PATH”

2. There also cases when IAM brokes up without apparent cause, and that happend to me.
The reason may be IAM itself.
Try standard tricks checklist from my another post here:
Problems using Eclipse IAM and Maven

I get NoClassDefFound for ContextLoaderListener class using Spring and Eclipse IAM Maven plugin

My most common headache during my last Spring project was:


java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener

during start of Tomcat.

Every source pointed to problems with spring.jar, so I suspected having some version conflict between my Spring libraries (eg. I used also Spring-WS in an old version). But that wasn’t real cause and I’d wasted a lot of time. The real problem was faulty Eclipse IAM plugin.

Try out some tricks I’ve described in my another article : Problems using Eclipse IAM and Maven

They really may help you.

Problems using Eclipse IAM and Maven

During my last project I was involved, I used Eclipse IAM plugin for integration with Maven. It caused many problems, mainly Class not found exceptions and issues with Tomcat server.

Generally I perceived that Eclipse IAM tends to lose jars from pom.xml, what leads to unexpected, bizarre time wasting NoClassDefFoundError.

Unfortunately I hadn’t been sucessful in finding causes of my problems but I’d like to share with you my standard ‘IAM problems checklist’ 😉

If you have any problems try this (in specified order) :

  1. Use refresh, then fetch source jars option from maven menu.
  2. Try cleaning maven libraries, then do ‘1.’
  3. After doing ‘2.’, remove your app from Tomcat, clean server, then deploy again.
  4. Try removing whole server, then add it again.
  5. REMOVE AND REGENERATE WHOLE WORKSPACE

Any step mentioned above is not a joke. I had really to ‘reset’ workspace a few times to make things work again.. First three steps helped me in 80% cases.

I hope my tips will save your time.

How to capture content of eclipse Console window (web tomcat application)?

The console window in eclipse has rather short ‘history’ and surprisingly the tomcat log file doesn’t appear anywhere on the hardrive when you run your application directly from eclipse. (Or it is situated in some mysterious place) It took me some time to find an option allowing to capture the content of console window to a given file.

The solution :

Run menu – > Run configurations… – ><your tomcat server > – > common – > Standard input and output

Tick the option ‘file’ and type path to your log file.

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