Teach Yourself Borland C++ in 14 Days - portal

410 Day 11
NOTE
NOTE
4. From the main menu, choose Run | Inspect. The Inspect dialog box is displayed.
5. Type this in the Expression field and click OK.
6. The Debug Inspector is displayed.
You can only inspect this from within a class member function. If you
happen to set a breakpoint in a regular function and then attempt to
inspect this, you will get an error stating that this is an invalid
symbol.
As you can see, when you’re inspecting classes the Debug Inspector window contains three
pages. The Data page shows all the data members for the class. The list of data members is
hierarchical. The first items listed are the data items that belong to the immediate class. The
next group of items listed is the data members of that class’s immediate ancestor class—in
this case, TForm. If you scroll down through the Debug Inspector list, you will see that
following the TForm data members are the data members for the TScrollingWinControl class
(TForm’s immediate ancestor) and on and on.
By using the arrow keys to move up and down through the list of data members, you can tell
at a glance what each data member’s type is (look at the status bar). To further inspect a data
member, double-click on the value column on the line showing the data member. A second
Debug Inspector window is opened with the selected data member displayed. You can have
multiple Debug Inspector windows open simultaneously.
The Debug Inspector has a lot of information to load, so scrolling
down through the list of items can be slow on some systems.
The Methods page of the Debug Inspector displays the class’s methods. As with the data
members discussed earlier, the list of methods is hierarchical. The first methods are those in
the immediate class, followed by the methods in the ancestor classes. In some cases the
Methods tab is not displayed (when inspecting simple data types, for instance).
The Properties page of the Debug Inspector shows the properties for the class being
inspected. Inspecting properties through the Debug Inspector is very slow if you
are inspecting a VCL inherited class. Most of the time you can accomplish the same thing
by inspecting the data member associated with a particular property on the Data page instead.
Inspecting the data member is much faster than inspecting properties.