Progress 4GL ABL (OpenEdge) Debugger?

Question

I work with a lot of legacy software, mostly in C/Java type languages (and thats where most of my experience is). One of our major applications though, is in Progress, currently using 9.1E I believe.

Im having a difficult time learning and adapting to this language. Implementing things takes 10 times longer, just linking parts of the source code to other parts (what calls what, etc) takes SO much time, if it can even be deciphered. Hell, I use Visual Studio to search the directories to try to trace function references. The code is not well documented.

My major problem though is the debugger, or lack thereof. The best method I learn with is stepping through code, changing stuff on the fly, or at the very least inspecting what is happening. There seems to be some sort of debugger there with step/break/etc functionality, but it doesnt seem to work at all. The debugger breaks (after inserting a message box debug message or something), but its all garbage and doesnt "step". The only method, and what is used by the only other developer here, is inserting debug message boxes with the variables you want to inspect.. REALLY??

Its a large mix of character Progress and newer GUI. The AppBuilder barely works, most of the SDO objects cant be loaded, JVM errors all over, etc. I use the Data Administration to dump the database schemas, compiler works, can query the DB well enough, etc., but its not enough.

Anyways, am I missing anything with the debugger? Is there anything better, or something else to do? Any other tools, IDEs, etc to facilitate maintaining/developing in this?

Answer 1

The v9 debugger was pretty bad. I don't know anyone who ever used it for very long. So, no, you probably aren't missing anything.

Of course v9 was a very long time ago...

The OpenEdge 10 & 11 debuggers are much better.

Answer 2

You can use the progress openedge debugger by just enabling the debugger mode using following commands in proenv.

• First set the ENABLE_OPENEDGE_DEBUGGER environment variable

• prodebugenable -enable-all -for disable the debugger prodebugenable -disable-all

• to learn more debugger codes please follow below link. https://documentation.progress.com/output/ua/OpenEdge_latest/index.html#page/dvdbg/debugging-by-controlling-breakpoints-from-an-abl.html

• To check execution time of the program you can use etime.

• Use Promon to moniter program performance.