Actions are debugged by placing Debug statements in your actions. When a Debug statement is executed it conditionally displays a panel describing various content. You have complete control over what content is displayed at runtime. You can also display any custom information that you wish by placing it in the Debug statement's prompt field.
The links at the bottom of this page provide access to information on the Debug statement, the displayed debug panel and the content configuration panel.
Much of the power of the Debug statement comes from its ability to conditionally display based on the value of the action debug state or the action test state. The action debug state is similar to the action test state with the exception that it is only used by the Debug statement. Using this capability, you can place Debug statements which only display under certain conditions. While you can conditionally display based on the value of the action test state it is often preferable to use the action debug state as the flow of your action will not be modified while debugging.
In the simplest usage model you place one or more unconditional (Always) Debug statements and one or more conditional ones testing the action debug state. When an unconditional Debug statement is encountered you can choose to continue action execution and set the action debug state to true or false. In this manner you can control the display of the conditional Debug statements.
More sophisticated triggers can be enabled by using compare statements in conjunction with the Debug Statement. The Compare Date, Compare Numeric and Compare Text statements all have a Debug setting. When Debug is enabled, the statements modify the action debug state as opposed to the action test state. This enables the construction of complicated test conditions which can be evaluated by a Debug statement and which do not change the action's designed flow.
When one of the compare statements has the Debug option enabled, it is treated as a debug statement. It will display with red text in an action editor window. This is done so that it is obvious that they are present for debugging purposes. The statements will also be located when searching for debug statements. The three compare statements which support the Debug setting are the only action statements which can modify the debug action state. The only other way of changing the debug action state is the already discussed method of closing a displayed debug panel while setting it to true or false.
The folowing example will only display the debug panel if named variable test has a value of abc:
Test if named variable 'test' is equal to "abc" (Set debug state)
Debug only if the action debug state is true