You're in Notes and you've enabled the debugger. Now, you attempt to debug a form or view action. It looks like your code executes, but the debugger is nowhere to be found. Looking carefully at your workspace, you notice a strange little message in the status area: "Debug request ignored. Source code hidden."

Fine, so just unhide the code. Hmmm... but the code's not hidden. And yet the debugger still doesn't debug. Sigh. Maybe the best approach is to rebuild the view (or form, or page, or action). No joy. So, next you try to delete the whole thing and just write it all from scratch. Still no joy.

And no debugger.

This is enough to make you nuts. The symptoms are weird. Agents can be debugged, but not actions.

Even more bizarre, the debugger might work for a while in a project while debugging actions, but as you write more and more code, it just plain stops. There is, in fact, a threshold. If you total number of lines of code in your action is somewhere above 1450 (and this could sometimes be across actions), the debugger will cease to debug.

What to do about it
If you read my notes carefully, you noticed a clue. Agents can be debugged, but not actions. So if you can move your code into an agent, even if just for the duration of debugging, you might be able to solve the problem.

If you don't want to move your code back out of the agent once you're done debugging, you could run it as a macro using ToolsRunMacro. It's crude as crude can be, but it should get the job done. And yes, this problem goes back a long way. As best as we can tell from our old lab notes, the problem was seen as far back as 2002, most likely in the earliest releases of Notes 6.0.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.