Debug Manipulators?

Lauren_Froschauer

I had been attempting to write a Feature that creates a hole on the selected face of an existing part. There had been no errors after I had committed the code, but the hole still was not appearing. After a long while of trying to debug my code, I noticed that before I selected the face of an existing part, the hole appeared to be extruding from the origin. As soon as I clicked the part face, the hole would disappear. I then realized that the hole was cutting in the wrong direction. Would it be possible to have debugging manipulators implemented through FeatureScript? This way, if a Feature is seen in an unexpected way, the user has a tool to find out why and rule out there being a bug. This would be great for highlighting faces/planes that have been queried, seeing the direction and form of extrusions, sweeps, etc. I never noticed, as a person who CADs often, that I rely so heavily on manipulators. 

ilya_baran

Lauren, your post sparked some good discussion about what we need to do to make debugging easier.  We will want some sort of visualization capability for this type of debugging so you can see query results or just visualize points, lines, etc.  I'm not sure manipulators are the right tool for this, but you can certainly create them -- see the source code of features that have manipulators (replaceFace is probably the simplest one).

Emily_Qi_Wang

@ilya_baran
Clarification: When @Lauren_Froschauer and I were discussing this in person, I thought of the manipulator arrow clearly showing the direction of an extrude as an example. We are not necessarily suggesting the drag-to-change manipulator experience for debugging; we are ultimately interested in visual indicators in the graphics area (arrows, highlights, etc). 

We'd love to hear some insights from your debugging discussions!

kevin_o_toole_1

@Emily_Qi_Wang
Yeah, I think we're all on the same page here. We're imagining syntax like:
debug(queryOrGeometry, "some optional info or metadata")

Which would:
1. Color the result of the query/point/plane/whatever in red on the graphics view
2. Print the info/metadata to the console
3. Cross-highlight between them, so that hovering on one would highlight the other (like features in your feature tree)

It would be a medium-term thing, which will take some work to get, but also isn't a solution for every debugging workflow.

We're definitely interested in hearing your input here.