Know who is calling a method

General
1

I have a method called from many other methods.
Is there a way to get the caller method name by code inside the called method?
I would like to avoid to set an optional parameter (for example: Optional callerName As String) in my caller method.

2

https://forum.xojo.com/14887-get-current-method-s-current-method-caller/

3

Thanks a lot. It’s exactly what I’m looking for.

4

xDev 13.6 Nov/Dec 2015 Tip 5: Who’s calling?

Sometimes you come across a question and shortly after you come across an answer to the question. That happened again when a few weeks ago I saw a thread on the forum where people debugging a problem wished for a simple way to know from where their methods were called. And then I ran across a [blog post] (http://www.realsoftwareblog.com/2012/05/debugging-tips.html) on the old REALbasic site where Thomas Tempelman addressed exactly that problem in quite a nifty way.

Basically he uses the fact that instances have a scope, a limited life time that ends when the method or event they are created in terminates. So he creates a MethodProfiler class with a Constructor and a Destructor that do the logging. When you instantiate a new MethodProfiler object then you pass it the name of the current method like this:

    Sub myMethod()
        dim myTmpObject as new MethodProfiler(CurrentMethodName)

Consequently when you create the class at the beginning of a method then the Constructor logs where that happens, and it stores the passed method name in its own mName property for later use in the Destructor:

    Sub Constructor(name as String)
        System.DebugLog "<"+name+"> Entered"
        mName = name
    End Sub

At the end of the method the MethodProfiler instance is destroyed and the Destructor is called - which logs that too:

    Sub Destructor()
        LogMsg "<"+mName+"> Exited"
    End Sub

So in the log you can easily follow your apps progress.

But you can do much more with it too:

  • you can globally enable/disable debugging
  • you could measure the time that the method takes to execute
  • you could count the depth, allowing you to indent the output, making it more readable if you have nested calls you want to trace.

For your convenience, Thomas made a demo project with a ready-to-use MethodProfiler class for you to [download] (http://files.tempel.org/RB/MethodProfiler.rbp.zip).

5

dim methodCaller as string try dim n as new NilObjectException Raise n catch err as NilObjectException dim s() as String = err.Stack s = Split(s(1),"%") methodCaller = s(0) end try

This code works fine on linux/mac but on windows err.stack is an empy rows array.

6

You enabled compiler to include function names?

7

You’re right as always! Using “include function names” works also on windows.

Great Christian!

Thanks a lot.

8

Welcome

9

I’ve been at this since REALBasic 4 and I constantly forget that for debugging …