Muting breakpoints

Posted by admin, July 13, 2009

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Debugging is an integral part of my workflow. One thing I continually encounter is the need to quickly disable all my breakpoints. After spending time inserting breakpoints at the right places with the right conditions, I sometimes want to quickly mute (disable) all of my breakpoints without actually removing them.

In order to do this, I wrote a couple of scripts, which mute and un-mute your breakpoints. I did this by reinstalling each breakpoint with a disabling expression (e.g. turn 'x==1' into 'false&&(x==1)') . To get all of the breakpoints currently installed in MATLAB, use dbstatus.

Here's what dbmute looks like :

function dbmute
%dbmute disables all breakpoints currently set in MATLAB.

    % iterate over each entry in the result of dbstatus,
    % and disable each of the breakpoints.
    breakpoints = dbstatus('-completenames');
    for i=1 : length(breakpoints)
        muteDbStatusEntry(breakpoints(i));
    end

end

function muteDbStatusEntry(dbstatusEntry)
%muteDbStatusEntry disables each breapoint in the given entry.
    for i=1 : length(dbstatusEntry.line)
        file = dbstatusEntry.file;
        line = dbstatusEntry.line(i);
        anonymousIndex = dbstatusEntry.anonymous(i);
        expression = dbstatusEntry.expression{i};

        lineNumberString = [num2str(line) '@' num2str(anonymousIndex)];
        newExpression = createDisabledExpression(expression);

        dbstop(file, lineNumberString, 'if', newExpression);
    end
end

function newExpression = createDisabledExpression(expression)
%createDisabledExpression wraps the given expression in a disabling
%  expression if necessary.
    if (isDisabled(expression))
        newExpression = expression;
    elseif strcmp(expression, '')
        newExpression = 'false';
    else
        newExpression = ['false&&(' expression ')'];
    end
end