Hello,
I was developping on Ignition 3 years ago.
I’m wondering if in the current version we can use a debugger (external like Eclipse or inside ignition) with break point and step by step functions?
I’ve found that we can use Eclipse to run external developpement into Ignition’s scope but I can’t find any information about debugging Python scripts developped inside Ignition (except with print in output console)
Do you have any information about it please?
I hope my question is understandable because i have not used Ignition since few years…
Thanks for your help
No, this isn’t currently possible (and won’t be, for the foreseeable future).
Opening Ignition’s files in an external editor is hard enough, because the designer never actually downloads the files to a location on disk - they only reside inside the designer. And even if you could open them in an external editor, there’s no way for autocompletion in that external editor to “know” about Ignition’s scripting functions [1].
Even if you managed to clear those hurdles, however, breakpoints inside Ignition script execution are a non-trivial problem. In the Vision client and designer, scripts mostly run on the same event dispatch thread that runs the entire GUI - so if you hit a breakpoint, the designer itself will lock up completely, which will then also lead to timeouts and various other errors as things attempt to continue running in the background. And breakpointing any scripts running on the gateway is basically impossible - to expose that level of control to a remote designer or other application is to give that remote controller full access to everything inside the gateway.
That said, better script editing is something we’re actively working on, and we’re very aware of community demand for it.
[1] Technically the designer could theoretically implement something called the ‘Language Server Protocol’, and then any IDEs that understand it would get the benefit of Ignition’s completions - but there’s no point adding that functionality without external editing, which would require some significant technical overhaul.
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Thank you for your reply.
I hope the new script editing will come soon 