Bug 487966

Description Bartlomiej Laczkowski 2016-02-17 15:14:00 EST

After playing around with the source code for DBGp variables model, I found out that there are some pitfalls that may e.g. cause the problems like the one described in bug #477241. The following is the list of refactoring proposals that should affect the way  how the model is being refreshed and updated in different views (especially "Variables" view):

1. Variables should be rather mutable instead of being replaced in the model after updating the related stack frame. In general all of the variables in the updated stack frame should be merged/updated with the new data from stack frame. Without going into details, current tree viewer implementation in views for handling variables may fail to update existing elements (variables) in the tree if new objects are used instead of updated ones. Using mutable elements should do the job, what's more while using them we can also reduce the "blinking" effect while updating the view contents.

2. Some of the elements in the Variables & Expression views are still using the default icon. The following elements should have some new icons:
 * Uninitialized element (or unreachable by means of max_array_depth parameter for XDebug)
 * String length variable (some virtual info)
 * String byte array elements (some virtual info)

3. The value of string variable is shown without quotes in Variables & Expression views ("Value" column). I think that we should change it to show string variables in the same way as it is in JDT for example.