How do I change the default value of the Port field on the Attach dialog programmatically?

Question

This is the dialog that appears when a NetBeans user selects the 'Attach Debugger...' item from the Debug menu.

I want to preset the value of the Port field so users just need to click OK to start debugging the process that my module has started.

Answer 1

To use this technique your module will need a dependency on Debugger Core API and the following could go into your Installer (Tested on NetBeans 6.9.1):

    // get the _debugger_ properties
    org.netbeans.api.debugger.Properties props = 
            Properties.getDefault().getProperties("debugger");

    Map<String, Map<String, String>> toSave = new HashMap<String, Map<String, String>>();
    Map<String, String> values = new HashMap<String, String>();
    values.put("port", "123"); // <- this is what you're after
    toSave.put("com.sun.jdi.SocketAttach", values);

    props.setMap("connection_settings", toSave);

For reference, this setting is located in:

~/.netbeans/6.9/config/Services/org-netbeans-modules-debugger-Settings.properties

And after running this code you'll have a section like:

debugger.connection_settings:# java.util.HashMap
debugger.connection_settings.0-key:"com.sun.jdi.SocketAttach"
debugger.connection_settings.0-value:# java.util.HashMap
debugger.connection_settings.0-value.0-key:"port"
debugger.connection_settings.0-value.0-value:"123"
debugger.connection_settings.0-value.length:1
debugger.connection_settings.length:1