Kexi/Debugging

General

Common information collected by the KDE Community:

KDE Debugging tutorials (KDE Techbase)
KDE Debugging FAQ (KDE Techbase)
Qt Creator can be used too (KDE Techbase)

Kexi Debug GUI

Kexi Debug GUI is a graphical tool for tracking internals of running Kexi application.

Isn't debug to standard output enough? The Debug GUI is richer and easier to follow.

Currently supported features, each in own separate tool window:

Logging SQL commands that are sent by Kexi to the database backends. This helps to track history of commands, helps to understand what happens regarding communication between the application and backends. The order is chronological. The window is always visible, and can be just minimized.
Displaying definition of an active Kexi form in XML format. Definition of original form (last saved version) and current form (after modification) is presented, so changes can be compared. To display the window, in Form Design toolbar, click Show Form UI code or press Ctrl+U shortcut.

Compiling the Debug GUI

First, the tool has to be compiled. By default its compilation is disabled. To enable compilation, go to the builddir, then use the ccmake visual tool:

% ccmake .

Find the CALLIGRA_DEBUG_GUI variable. To do so press "/" key to search, type CALLIGRA_DEBUG_GUI, press Enter. When you find it, if it's set to OFF, press enter to switch it to ON.

Similarly, find the KEXI_DEBUG_GUI variable and set it to ON.

You need to reconfigure the project to apply changes. To do so, type "g" key and wait until the configuration step finishes and ccmake exists.

Then compile Kexi using:

% make -j{NUMBER} install".

Enabling the Debug GUI

Once compiled, the tool can be freely enabled or disabled. When enabled, each Kexi application displays additional window used for outputting debug information.

To enable the GUI, dedicated setting should be altered once in Kexi's configuration file. To do so, open the local kexirc file:

% kate `kde4-config --localprefix`/share/config/kexirc

Note

The command kde4-config --localprefix returns general value of current local prefix for your user account, this is useful since you might have set a custom prefix as advertised in the Calligra/Building article. So for custom prefix it may be something like $HOME/kde4/inst/.kde4/ rather than $HOME/.kde.

The file is in a simple INI format. Now find a [General] section, and ShowInternalDebugger setting within it. Change the section to true. If the setting line is missing, insert it. The section would finally look like:

[General]
ShowInternalDebugger=true