Can a debug adapter indicate variables with possible-side-effects/expensive?

[DanTup]

Currently my Dart debugger only shows fields from objects in debugging tooltips (no properties/getters) to avoid executing user code or causing side effects (that's the behaviour of the debugger, not my adapter, though I understand why they've done it).

I believe I could get these values from the debugger by executing the getters but it could be slow/cause side effects.

Is there a way when returning objects to provide variables that require user-input to evaluate? Similar to how in Visual Studio you can expand iterators when debugging but they're not executed automatically?

I saw microsoft/vscode-node-debug#14 which seemed like it might be related, but I didn't understand the resolution after clicking through the related cases. I also found the expensive flag on Scope but couldn't figure out if that would be useful here.

[DanTup]

I need to get me a @vscodebot[bot], I think it could automate half of what I do at work =D

[weinand]

If you enable "evaluate" based hovers, you could use the "context" argument to decide whether the "evaluate" is used for the variables view or the hover. With this info you could ignore properties/getters for the hover, but include them for the variables view.
Without enabling "evaluate" based hovers, VS Code will use the variables view's data for the hover as well.

[DanTup]

@weinand I actually want both to behave the same, rather just have user input to invoke any getter. I could probably take it by hiding then inside an object that needs expanding, but I think it'd probably look rather misleading?

[weinand]

and with "user input" you mean a context menu action?

[DanTup]

Or some icon or something. Similar to in Visual Studio's refresh button like this:

Something simple a user has to do to invoke the getter (both to avoid unwanted side-effects and also for performance reasons, since I need to send individual requests for each getter to the debugger to get their values).

[isidorn]

This is a nice feature request which is not on our immediate plan -> backlog.
Also one of those things which to me does not feel like it belongs in a minimalstic code editor like VSCode.

[vscodebot]

This issue has been closed because the feature it requests is not within the scope of the product. See also our issue reporting guidelines.

Happy Coding!