Debugging Complex Classes with the [DebuggerDisplay] Attribute

Here's a scenario I ran into just last week. I was working on some code to edit PowerPoint PPTX files using C# and the OpenXML libraries. If you've ever tried using them before, you know that the OpenXML libraries are impossibly complex and nearly impossible to understand. And as much as I might have wanted to keep my code simple, I was losing and the complexity was growing.

The bugs I was getting were pretty complex, too. I'd put a bunch breakpoints in my code and then I'd be using the debug visualization tools in Visual Studio to try to figure out what was going wrong. But the problem was the my bugs could be just about anywhere in a giant tree of objects. It was really hard to figure out what was going on just by looking at the debug windows. For example, just check out that Locals debugging window in the screenshot below. It's nested object after nested object after nested object.

I needed to tame that debugging sprawl.

The [DebuggerDisplay] Attribute
I'm not sure how I found out about this, but there's this cool feature in Visual Studio and .NET that lets you customize how your objects appear in the debugger. It's the DebuggerDisplay attribute in System.Diagnostics. I'd never used it before because -- well -- I just assumed that it must be difficult to use.

But it turns out that it's super easy to implement. If you know how to use interpolated strings, you pretty much know how to implement the debugger display attribute.

Here's a quick review of interpolated strings. Let's say that you have three values that you want to combine into a single string: current date, a random number, and the OS version string. You could combine them using the "+" operator -- that's the old-school, original way.

Or you could combine them using string interpolation. Just put a "$" in front of the string and then wrap the variable names you want to use inside of curly braces. Done.

Tame the Debugging Mess
Rather than try to demo this with OpenXml APIs, I'm going to introduce a more understandable example. Let's say that I have a Person class that has a property for Name and a property for PhoneNumber. Most of the time you'd probably just have a Person class with a string property for FirstName, a string property for LastName, and a string property for PhoneNumber. But since I need some complexity, I'm splitting these into separate classes so that I get an object model:

To keep adding complexity, let's say that I'm writing my own PersonCollection class and I'm trying to write a unit test to make sure that when I "foreach" over the PersonCollection, that the objects are always returned in alphabetical order by name.

When I look at the "actual" collection variable in the debugger, I see a list of 5 objects but I can't see the values:

In order to figure out what the values are, I need to start expanding properties in the watch window. That gives me something that looks like this:

So, I can see that the values are clearly not sorted by last name but the next time that I run this code, it's going to show me the original view and I'm going to have to click a bunch of times to get to the data.

Add the DebuggerDisplay Attribute
What would be a lot nicer would be a simple view of my Person properties right in the debugger when I'm looking at that collection. This is exactly what the DebuggerDisplay attribute does.

At the top of the Person class, I'll just add the DebuggerDisplay attribute and then provide it with an interpolated string describing how I'd like to visualize the data in the debugger. In this case, I want to see the LastName value, a comma, FirstName, and then the phone number.

The next time that I run this code and hit that breakpoint, I see much more descriptive data in the Values column:

And now I can focus on fixing my bug rather than crawling through a tree of values in the watch windows.

Conclusion
Debugging complex trees of objects can be difficult even with great debugging tools. In order to make it easier on yourself, consider adding the DebuggerDisplay attribute to those difficult-to-debug classes. DebuggerDisplay allows you to provide a view of your object in the Visual Studio debugger windows that have exactly the data you need to see in order to fix your problems.

If you'd like the source code for this demo, you can get it on GitHub.

About the Author
Benjamin Day is a consultant, trainer and author specializing in software development, project management and leadership.

Posted by Benjamin Day on 10/17/2024