About Debugging Free-Form Projects

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Similar to commands for compiling and running, debugging commands rely on various information, such as the location of your sources, the location of the compiled classes and other items on the classpath, and name of the project's main class.

In , the IDE does not "know" about any of these things. When you run a command in the IDE (such as Build), the IDE simply calls a target in your build script and lets the script handle the command. Therefore, for debugging to work, you also have to have a build script target for debugging. The IDE provides some custom Ant tasks to work with the debugger and also can generate a basic debug target, which attempts to fill in important details based on other targets in your script.

To set up debugging in a free-form project, you need to do the following:

For a full guide to configuring free-form projects, see:

See Also
About Free-Form Projects
Mapping an Ant Target to an IDE Command
Storing IDE Targets in a Separate Ant Script
About Debugging Java Applications
Debugging Tasks: Quick Reference

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