In Visual Studio, when you work with types from the C++ Standard Library or other common APIs, you might be familiar with a concise view of those objects in debugger. You can hover a mouse over an entity, and then the debugger presents short information about their current state. For example:

Sometimes, the default view of objects in the debugger won’t be enough, especially if you operate on complex data structures. Fortunately, there’s a way to alter the view and write custom ones.

Visualizers - Natvis  

Before Visual Studio 2012 you could customise your objects’ debugging view by editing autoexp.dat file. It was a bit clumsy to use, though. Both the Automatic expansion of structures and avoid stepping into particular functions were configured using this file. Since VS 2012 we got a new framework called Natvis that uses XML to describe rules for debugging views.

For a simple example, let’s have a look at the following class:

class SimpleParam {
public:
   SimpleParam(std::string str, int val) : mStr(std::move(str)), mVal(val) { }
    
    // some API
        
private:
    std::string mStr;
    int mVal{ 0 };
};
    
// in use:
SimpleParam input{ "number", 42 };

When we hit a breakpoint just after input is created, we might get the following view in Visual Studio 2019:

Visual Studio 2019 default debugger view

The view is not too bad. We can easily see all data members of input. But with Natvis we can create a custom view of that.

In the solution for the example project, there’s NatvisFile.natvis attached. It’s a per-project configuration for the debugger. Inside there’s the following definition:

<AutoVisualizer xmlns = "...">
    <Type Name = "SimpleParam">
        <DisplayString>String: {mStr, sb}, Integer Value{ mVal }, StrLen{ strlen(&mStr[0]) }</DisplayString>
    <Expand>
        <Item Name = "String">mStr, sb< / Item>
        <Item Name = "Integer Value">mVal< / Item>
        </Expand>
    </Type>
</AutoVisualizer>

What it does is a simple alteration of the view. It will add custom descriptions of the member fields and the string length information.

Visual Studio 2019 custom debugger view through the Natvis file

Please note that there’s still [Raw View] option, that displays the default view.

Here are the things you can do with the framework:

  • it works on exact types, derived types and even templates
  • you can change names, select variables to be shown
  • use expressions on variables (but not with side effects), some predefined Debugger intrinsic functions are available (like strlen)
  • use conditional expressions to show more/less information
  • show arrays, or even multi-dimensional arrays, linked lists structures
  • custom logic for traversing the structures
  • keep natvis files per project, or load them globally (just put it in something like C:\Users\Admin\Documents\Visual Studio 2019\Visualizers)
  • you can see existing views for common STL types by looking at files in the following folder: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\Packages\Debugger\Visualizers
  • if the file is attached to a project, then the debugger will dynamically reload it after re-saving (even while debugging!)

You can also enable diagnostics to see issues with your natvis file:

The example code can be found in my GitHub repository: https://github.com/fenbf/articles/tree/master/DebuggingTipsSamples

Next time I’ll show you how to write a custom visualisation for a class that behaves like a container. Stay tuned!

You Turn  

Have you played with the natvis framework? Do you have per-project custom visualisations?

Share your comments and join discussion in this reddit /cpp thread

References