Is there a way to debug Velocity templates in the traditional code debugging sense?

debugging templates velocity vtl
Peter picture Peter · Sep 20, 2008 · Viewed 10.3k times · Source

We make heavy use of Velocity in our web application. While it is easy to debug the Java side of things and ensure the Velocity Context is populated correctly, it would be extremely valuable to be able to step through the parsing of the VTL on the merge step, set breakpoints, etc. Are there any tools or IDEs/IDE plugins that would make this kind of thing possible with VTL (Velocity Template Language)?

Answer

DJ. picture DJ. · Nov 1, 2011

I had not found any yet. The closest I can get is to hack a logging framework to print out information that you want.

What you do is:

  1. create an class with logging method which return boolean value.
  2. Inject the object into velocity context
  3. From inside velocity template you can call the logging method with #if($logger.log($data)) #end

Related questions

How to Debug Variables in Smarty like in PHP var_dump()

I have some variables inside a template and I don't know where I assigned them. I need to know what is inside a particular variable; for instance, say I have a variable in smarty called member. I tried with {debug} …

Read More
Django debug display all variables of a page

Is there a template tag (or any other trick) I can use to display all the variables available in a page?

Read More
How do I remedy "The breakpoint will not currently be hit. No symbols have been loaded for this document." warning?

A C# desktop application on the express edition worked, but then it didn't work 5 seconds later. I tried the following: Ensure debug configuration, debug flag, and full debug information are set on all assemblies. Delete all bin and obj folders …

Read More