Debug facilities

The Emulator is designed to be the primary development and debugging tool for the Symbian platform, alongside any language specific tools provided by development environments.

In debug builds, the GUI provides special key combinations for resource checking and redraw testing, which can help to trap memory leaks early in the development cycle. All debug keys are accessed using a ctrl+alt+shift prefix.

All GUI applications may be exited using ctrl+E. Additionally the Window Server provides ctrl+alt+shift+K to kill the application with current keyboard focus.

Drawing:

T brings up a task list by which running applications can be switched to or closed down. Note that this is a debugging aid only. R redraw whole screen, to test whether applications handle complete redraw properly F enable window server auto-flush for all programs using the current control environment G disable window server auto-flush for all programs using the current control environment

Miscellaneous features:

V turn on or off verbose information messages Z send keys A through J in fast sequence to the application, to test its ability to handle fast repeated keys

Resource allocation:

A show number of heap cells allocated on user heap by the current program B show number of file server resources in use by the current program C show number of window server resources in use by the current program P show dialog for the heap failure tool: see below for details Q turn off heap failure mode

The heap failure tool artificially generates resource allocation failures. It is used by developers to test that an application copes properly with such failures. The dialog options are as follows:

• App heap failure Type: generates failures for resource allocation requests from applications. Random means that requests fail at a random rate. Deterministic means that requests fail at the rate specified in the Rate box.

• Wserv heap failure Type: generates failures for resource allocation requests from the Symbian platform window server. The options are as for App heap failure.

• File failure tool: selecting this option generates failures for file access attempts.

E Start (Enable) window server logging. D Stop (Disable) window server logging. W Dumps the full window tree. H Dumps the contents of the window server's heap.