Detecting the connection of Debug Application tool

[Thoric]

When building an application you can "Enable Debugging", which allows the connection of the LabVIEW Debug Application feature to debug a deployed executable.

I was wondering if there was a way to detect the connection of the debugger from within the app itself?

Reason - during development phase I want my deployed app to be aware when a remote connection for debugging is established. Currently it has a frameless (borderless) User Interface which makes it impossible to reveal the block diagram (Ctrl+E doesn't work). If I connect the Debug Application tool it's because I want to debug the code, so I need to see the block diagram. I figured I could either detect the connection of the debugger and automatically show the block diagram, or change the VI properties to show the toolbar and hence allow me to select "Windows > Show Block Diagram".

[BertMcMahan]

I thought you could just right click the front panel to see the BD in a remote debug session:

https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA03q000000YHpiCAG&l=en-US

[Thoric]

That doesn't appear to work for me. I am deploying to a cRIO (Linux RT), so the app isn't a standard Windows one. I wonder if this makes a difference to that right-click behaviour? Sadly there's very little documentation on the limitations of this tool to RT targets.

[UliB]

The help says: "Determines whether the Debug Server is enabled. You can use this property only in LabVIEW-built applications or shared libraries."

I don't know if this is working the way you are looking for.

[Thoric]

Thanks - I'll do some quick testing to see if that does what I need it to, however I'm not optimistic since it's a writeable property. I wouldn't expect I could write to a variable that tells me when the debug tool is connected, therefore I expect this enables the debug feature.

[billko]

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@Thoric wrote:

Thanks - I'll do some quick testing to see if that does what I need it to, however I'm not optimistic since it's a writeable property. I wouldn't expect I could write to a variable that tells me when the debug tool is connected, therefore I expect this enables the debug feature.

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Could be that you can set it, but you can also read the status.

[pincpanter]

Maybe accessing this URL: http://localhost:3580/dumpinfo? can give you the desired information.

See https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000019KvsSAE&l=it-IT for more details.

My guess is that the Connection: field of your application entry would be Open. I don't know if the article also refers to RT environments, but in my opinion it is worth checking.

[Thoric]

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@billko wrote:

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@Thoric wrote:

Thanks - I'll do some quick testing to see if that does what I need it to, however I'm not optimistic since it's a writeable property. I wouldn't expect I could write to a variable that tells me when the debug tool is connected, therefore I expect this enables the debug feature.

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Could be that you can set it, but you can also read the status.

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The value was consistently True. It didn't change to reflect the status of whether the debug tool was connected or not.

[UliB]

Is it possible to identify the connection from looking at the debug port (cmd /c "netstat -ano | findstr :3580")?

I have not a second computer at hand to test and looking at localhost (0.0.0.0) does not help.

[pincpanter]

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@UliB  ha scritto:

Is it possible to identify the connection from looking at the debug port (cmd /c "netstat -ano | findstr :3580")?

I have not a second computer at hand to test and looking at localhost (0.0.0.0) does not help.

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3580 is the listening port of the NI Service Locator. As I understood it, The TCP port for debugging is dynamically assigned to each debuggable application.