debugDescription

When I was preparing my talk about remote debugging toolset PonyDebugger at NSLondon I had a pre-presentation in front of my lovely co-workers. I was talking a lot about debugging and how to be efficient when doing this. After finished the talk I was asked many questions but this stood out…

Luka, why don’t you write code without bugs?

@Isabel_Glover https://twitter.com/Isabel_Glover

Good question, but that’s just how it is. We are all humans after all and we make mistakes sometimes. Or maybe the third party libraries we use are not polished enough and specific methods do not function properly so you need to debug.

Just a random model

So with an abundance of models in your project imagine that you have a model for Person

@interface LBPerson : NSObject

@property NSString *name;
@property NSString *surname;
@property NSUInteger age;
@property NSString *city;

- (id)initWithName:(NSString *)name Surname:(NSString *)surname Age:(NSUInteger)age City:(NSString *)city;

@end

You are fiddling around, debugging and inspecting the values that are held inside a newly created object.

LBPerson *luka = [[LBPerson alloc] initWithName:@"Luka" Surname:@"Bratos" Age:25 City:@"London"];

Let’s debug, yay

Let’s do things like this and waste our time:

NSLog(@"%@", luka);

Output: 2014-03-25 21:53:28.488 Debug[6752:60b] <LBPerson: 0x8c6a110>

NSLog(@"%@", luka.name);

Output: 2014-03-25 21:55:06.740 Debug[6794:60b] Luka

This is not very useful. And it takes too much time to write these annoying NSLog’s.

The right way

If you take a look and dive into NSObject header file you will see these two methods:

- (NSString *)description;
@optional
- (NSString *)debugDescription;

In the iOS Developer Library, more specifically in Mac OS X Debugging Magic you can see the definition for description is:

All Cocoa objects (everything derived from NSObject) support a description method that returns an NSString describing the object.

But in most cases the default description is not enough. You can still get some information out but it can be done better.

debugDescription

You can take advantage of GBD or lldb debugger and use print-object or po. By default po will basically call the debugDescription method which by default invokes description method of the specified object.

You can decouple these by implementing debugDescription on your own.

- (NSString *)debugDescription
{
  return [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Name: %@\nSurname: %@\nAge: %d\nCity: %@\n", self.name, self.surname, self.age, self.city];
}

End result