NAV 2013 R2 | Debugger Watches

I totaly love the concept of pages. They are easier to merge and upgrade and they way they render is awesome. However, they come with a few drawbacks. Some of them we already had in the classic client with forms, some are new.

One of the drawbacks is the lack of drag and drop. This was true for the classic client too.

A place in Dynamics NAV where it is very obvious what would be the value of drag and drop is the debugger. The debugger in NAV2013(R2) is designed as a page.

Like this:

In general it works pretty good. It is easier to break, toggle breakpoints and the fact that you can debug any user on the servicetier is just straigt from heaven.

But one of the things that was a 1000 times easier in the old debugger was watches. It is no longer possible to just drag and drop them.

However… I only recently found a neat trick and I figured “how is it that I did not notice this earlier”.

The AL codepart is developped as a client add-in which allows to send events to the page. One of the events is adding a watch while hovering over a variable like this:

Now take a close look at the icon

If you push the + sign the variable is added to the watchlist.

Personally I find myself pretty foolish not noticing it for more than like 2 or 3 years but hey, I might not be the only one.

Here is the event in AL:

Enjoy