How to Debug in SAP NWDS

More often I need to debug the custom action classes written in Java to mend some of the standard action flow. During this course of changing the action flow of the application, I need to debug my action classes many times to see if the things are falling in place or to remove bugs.

I found out every time, I go for debugging in a new client environment, its always a challenge initially. So I decided to write some notes to myself on this.

For any SAP J2EE server to enable debugging we need to follow following steps:

1. Enable debugging at the server level using the configtool if the server bellow 7.3 version. In case the server is 7.3 or higher then this can be done by going to the MMC perspective in the NWDS 7.3 and enabling the debugging option from there.

2. Ensure in versions below 7.3, that the config tool has different port entries for Instance level debug settings and Server level debug settings. I faced this issue and it took me almost 4 days to figure that out.

3. Next is to put the breakpoint in the Java code and configure the debug settings for the class.

THATS IT!! you are ready with your debug session.... Happy Debugging :)