Debugging groovy in ADF

So I have completed my introduction to ADF course so will hopefully be able to start work on the side projects we have been given time for. It was interesting just how easy it was to do a lot of common things in ADF.

One this that did concern a lot of use was how to debug certain parts of ADF. Steve has a post on this topic but that doesn't say anything about the numerous cases where groovy is used as an expression language.

Since Groovy runs on the same VM as your application you can easily call out to external classes, so you simply need to create a handy debug class that returns the value it is passed in:

package project2;

public class Debug {
    public static <T> T debug(T object, Object... objects) {
        return object;
    }
}

You can then put this in your scripts, for example in this derived attribute on a view object:

You can then inspect both the value you have calculated along with any parameters you have passed in using the debugger:

It seems that by default the groovy scripts are not compiled to bytecode which is a shame as you can't step out into the groovy code; but this little hack can help in certain situations. Thank to my co worker Alan Davis for pointing out that there way a simpler method than generating a class with the client "breakpoint" bytecode in it :-).