It is my understanding that when you call a method with an object as a parameter it is by default passed as a reference and you can see and modify object properties. I also understand that if you want to be able to replace the object and return it that you can pass it “byref” and do so.
With the above being stated, when I pass an object preceded with “byref” (a class variable for instance) in Xojo 2.3 I can only see the object as “nil” in the debugger even though the code works as expected. If the object is not passed as byref the object can be viewed in the debugger as expected.
One of the benefits of passing the object with “byref” is if it is truly nil, it can be instantiated in the method, changed and returned. If it is not passed by “byref”, if it is nil and instantiated, it will still be nil on return and cause a nil object exception.
What I don’t understand though is why the debugger will not show the contents of an object passed byref.
Using an older version the byref parameter does change to an instance when assigned to, but in Xojo 15r2.2 it stays nil. Note that if you select higher in the stack and view the variable that was passed in, it changes to an instance.