Thursday 27 July 2017

DebuggerDisplay Attribute

While working on complex classes/objects, it really takes two more clicks to either add that object to the Watch window or expand the object in visualizer and navigate to specific property.
To avoid these extra steps and to make your debugging bit faster, you can decorate class with specific property using DebuggerDisplay attribute. Applying this attribute makes sure that when you add object to Watch window, it displays the value of above property in Value column.

For example, I have below Model class for which I am creating an object and list of objects with some dummy values. Also, I have decorated this class with DebuggerDisplay attribute that has definition as to display name of the person, ID of the person and length of a name.

/// <summary>
/// Debugger Display Attribute – Model class
/// </summary>
[DebuggerDisplay("Emp ID = {name} - {ID} - {name.Length}")]
public class TestDebuggerDisplay
{
    public string name
    {
      get; set;
    }
    public int ID
    {
      get; set;
    }
}

Main Class:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {

        TestDebuggerDisplay obj = new TestDebuggerDisplay() { ID=1, name="name1" };
        List<TestDebuggerDisplay> lstObjs = new List<TestDebuggerDisplay>();

        for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++)
        {
        lstObjs.Add(new TestDebuggerDisplay()
                {
                ID = 10 * (i + 1),
                name = $"name{10 * (i + 1)}"
                }
                );
         }

            Console.WriteLine();
   }
}

Output:

While you are debugging, you would see that, when the object is added to watch window you can see the value for that object as below:







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