PR# 13491 Watch tab has disappeared, and I can't find a way to get it back

Problem Report Summary
Submitter: gcompestine
Category: EiffelStudio
Priority: Medium
Date: 2007/10/23
Class: Bug
Severity: Serious
Number: 13491
Release: 6.0.7.499
Confidential: No
Status: Analyzed
Responsible: jfiat_es
Environment: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; AXAR_Corp_Device; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.1)
Synopsis: Watch tab has disappeared, and I can't find a way to get it back

Description
I've been going through a horrible little experience with the user interface. The end result is that the Watch tab in the Objects panel has disappeared and I don't see any way of getting it back through the UI.

How I got there:

1) This started out when I tried to inspect the interface of a class in my system and got the error message in the context window "Select a class that's been compiled". I forget the exact wording, but you get the idea. This was wrong, since I obviously had the class right there, and there was even an object in my "Objects" panel of the type I wanted to inspect. 

2) I tried to rearrange the Objects panel and the Context panel so that the two parts were close together and I could do a nice little screen capture of the error message and the objects panel showing that indeed there was the object. Instead I unintentionally undocked the Objects panel.

3) There used to be flyover indicators for docking, but I'm not seeing those, at least I didn't this run. 

4) Okay, so maybe I can rearrange things side-by-side? Nope. Instead, the Objects panel merged suddenly with the context panel, and now I've got a S***load of tabs in one panel and no hope of displaying the two things I want to display at the same time.

5) So in the past, closing an undocked panel like this automatically redocked it (or so I thought). Instead, this now appears to destroy/close the tab in the undocked panel. 

6) For some reason I still don't fathom I thought that was interesting and continued hitting the close button until the last tab was closed and the panel disappeared. 

7) Groping around the pulldown menus, I saw the "View/Reset Tools Layout" option. Perfect. Lots of redrawing later, things started to look normal. Except there's no watch tab. And the now EiffelStudio knows about the class I wanted to inspect at the very beginning.

8) There are options for saving and opening a layout. I go to another EStudio session (thats in normal non-debug mode) and save that layout witht the name okay". In my original session I save the layout as "no_watch". I then load "okay". The normal layout gets impinged on my debug layout, so now the objects panel is gon altogether, as are all the debug panels normally on the left side. I didn't expect the Save/Open functionality to be context oblivious.

But the good news (if I can call it that) is that the Watch window is back! But its undocked and at coordinates 0,0 which means its under my Windows Taskbar (I keep that docked to the left edge of my display.

10) But the bad news is that when I restore the original layout (saved as no_watch) the poor little Watch window goes away again.

11) There's no indication in the pulldown menus that control the display of various tools as to whether or not a given tool is currently displayed. It might be a good idea to indicate in some way that state. And it would be good if it were a complete list (ie the Watch tool was included.)

Or am I missing something here, and there's an easy way of restoring the Watch window that I don't know about?

To Reproduce

										
Problem Report Interactions
From:gcompestine    Date:2007/10/23    Download   
No, instead I went back to the saved layout and eventually it came back on its own.

I didn't notice when that happened, perhaps after I started a new debug session.

From:jfiat_es    Date:2007/10/23    Status: Analyzed    Download   
Did you tried the menu: Debug -> Tool -> Create new watch , or just below the separator, there should be a list of existing watch tools ?