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This week I got the following request "Add functionality to 'watch' identifiers and view the data of all those watched items within a window panel".



I did some probing with the requester to better understand the need for this and I learned it would help the developer to debug faster than using various data pages, or see values inline via the debugger.



My thinking at this point is:

- One would like to be able to watch the identifiers in the Developer IDE (something like you do in R Studio - see picture below)

- One would be able to dive in details of the data via a DataPage option (only first items are shown; like x below in R Studio example)

- One would select identifiers to watch from the model tree (or model) and not necessarily ALL identifiers that are touched (could be an extreme long list)?



Wonder about your thoughts



I usually split my screen: the code at the left and then a data page at the right with 1 or more identifiers in it. While debugging step by step, I can visually see what data is changing. What could be improved there, is to get the pivoting right at the start. For example, I almost always put the table in sparse mode (4 clicks every time). I like your thinking to introduce some sort of hierarchy here, with drill down functionality. For me, it would be useful to quickly see what has changed (tuple level), which is particularly challenging for identifiers with a large cardinality.





I also heard to possibility to put a breakpoint in the definition of an identifier. Even if there is no definition, it should break whenever the data of that identifier is changed. I still have to try this out though, but it sounded useful.

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