Question

So I have a few properties that I’m using in some sample code I’m playing with. Notably the "tag" property of the UIView class. Now I set this property, and if I NSLog it, or setup control statements based on the value of tag, I can see that the value I set is there, and being acted upon as expected.

However, if I hover the mouse over the .tag to see which tag value is there, I get nothing at all from Xcode. No pop up showing the value. So then I go to the auto/local/all window and I try to "Add Expression…" (seems that’s the only way to setup a traditional "watch" variable, if there is another way, please let me know). Anyhow so I put my object.tag into the "watch" window and it’s blank. No value. It isn’t zero it’s just nothing, as if it didn’t exist.

Of course if I hover the mouse over the "object" part of "object.tag" then I get a pop up for the object with the disclosure triangle, which I expand, then I go looking for "_tag" (which appears to be the underlying instance variable).

So what is so difficult about this? Why isn’t the tag property viewable during debug by simply hovering over it? Is this something to do with properties in Xcode dev?

I’m running Xcode 4.3.2

Answer 1

The tag property, as any other Objective-C property, is a syntactic sugar. In fact, properties are implemented as accessor methods, which, in turn, are translated to objc_msgSend() function calls. This machinery is nothing like accessing a struct field.

The debugger can show any field in a struct basically because it doesn’t require any special knowledge and doesn’t have any consequences. Only the struct definition is needed. Getting the value of an Objective-C property, on the other hand, requires executing code in the process context. You can do that manually in the debugger console, but the debugger just won’t do this automatically.

I think this is still theoretically possible in isolated cases, but incredibly hard. Consider a case where executing an accessor method changes the object’s internal state. For example, calling -[UIViewController view] (accessing its view property) results in loading the view. There may also be delegate methods called, etc. In such cases hovering the mouse over the property in IDE would alter the execution state of the process and thus make debugging itself a joke.