Support Data Type Renderers

[cdalvaro]

Please, add support for showing complex structures with pretty printers.

e.g. DateTime objects

DateTime objects are difficult to see at first-sight by default

It would be very useful if the debugger view showed something like this

[hurricup]

Well, in Java, for example, every object has toString method, which is doing exactly the thing. But perl doesn't have such mandatory method or convention.

Is there any unified method to do this? May be some module that can represent popular modules in the cool way?

I don't really want to hardcode this for every possible object.

[cdalvaro]

Well, I know the module Data::Printer, that might can be useful for this purpose, like it is shown in this article

[hurricup]

As far as i know this is just a pretty (and may be more flexible/configurable) Data::Dumper. Not exactly what are you talking about.

The only way I can see here is to hardcode some cases and make a convention, like "if class has a to_string method it's going to be used"

[pablrod]

Although there is no toString in Perl, many objects overload the "" operator (aka stringification). That is called when a reference to an object is evaluated in string context.

Maybe this can be used as a kind of preview. With DateTime objects this works perfectly. Indeed this is what Eclipse Perl Plugin does.

[juanrad]

Are there plans to include this feature? I would find this very useful.

[hurricup]

@juanradiego there is still no concept for this. How do you see this? I don't like the idea to hardcode serializing for different classes.

[juanrad]

As I see it, there is no need to hardcode any specifics for this particular case, because the "" operator is the default stringification in Perl objects, as @pablrod said. I think you may consider use this operator for the default preview of objects in the inline inspetor, so you will delegate in every object implementation.

Thanks for your work by the way. The plugin works very nice.

[hurricup]

This won't work everywhere. After some investigation, seems we need something like this: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/debugger-data-type-renderers.html

[cdalvaro]

Thanks @hurricup for developing this great plugin!

[hurricup]

Ok, I've got something like this (for the Foo::Baz, there is a configured renderer):