Hello all.

First off all, let me introduce myself since this is my first post here.
Even if (as you would have noticed anyway) I am new to Android dev, I have quite a few years of coding behind me, using MS (C++, dotNet, WPF).

Today I've been through all steps of the hello world tutorial from the official site.
Everything worked as described, except that I've choosen a 2.3.3 target platform (the emulator seemed to me faster in that configuration).

My question is about the last part of this tutorial. They fire a NullPointerException to test debugging:

Code: Select all

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        Object o = null;
        o.toString();
        setContentView(R.layout.main);
    }


We are told to put a breakpoint before the exception is thrown, and eclipse breaks there... OK!

But I wanted to test a "normal life" scenario. In a normal life unhandled exception case, you have at the beginning no breakpoint. Your devenv breaks on unhandled exception, you get some info about that exception (call stack) that helps you putting some breakpoints and understand why the exception is being thrown...

In my case, without any breakpoint, Eclipse breaks (good!), but I have no clue at all about the exception.

First, it breaks in ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(...) and not in my onCreate(...) code.
I have no source code for ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(...) -see screenshot-, which seems normal to me.

On the top right of the debug screen, in Eclipse, I have a "Variables" tab. Into it, a "e" variable of type NullPointerException which may be my unhandled exception... But no clue in there: stack trace is null...
Member cause of the exception is also a NullPointerException, for which the cause is a NullPointerException, and so on, seamingly without end...

No info in log cat, no info in error log...

Screenshot:


Could someone tell me if that behaviour from Eclipse is correct or not, and how to get info about the exception?

Thanks in advance...

That's typical from my experience. If something I did causes an exception in the onCreate method of an activity, I find I get very little useful information back to debug with.

Maybe somebody else has figured out a better method for debugging onCreate methods...

For debugging the code and its flows, I would recommend that we should use the IDE logger,that can be written by our self. I means, write the program, which prints some self explanatory lines on the console with the class name and time. using this you guy's can check that where was the exception occurred and in which class,

Thanks for your answers.
Whitt83, so it seems that its a problem of Android calling onCreate(...) and catching too many things. I'm at least happy that it is not a problem of my devenv install...
raj_J2ME, If I understand you well, what you propose would cost extra development. but I'll keep the idea if I land sometime on a difficult problem...

Yeah that will need to write the code, however this code will not be too long to write, it will bu only with few lines, and it will be reusable for you in your coming apps and development..