External compilation pane

Introduction

During the majority of ordinary development projects in Eiffel, it may be rare for programmers to need to know what's going on with the external compilation that occurs during freezing and finalization steps. However, during the development of some types of systems, particularly those that involve interfaces to non-Eiffel components, it is helpful to monitor the external compilation.

The external compilation pane shows a log of the compilation output from the external (typically C language) compiler. But the external compilation pane is more than just a log. It has powerful features that help you deal with the results of external compilation.

Selecting your locale

If the external compiler uses a different locale than your default locale, you can select your particular locale in the "Locale" box on the bottom bar of the Outputs tool.

Opening a project folder

You can explore a project folder by using open folder ( ) on the bottom bar. When you click the triangle ( ) to the right of the open folder icon, you will see a list of project folders, as shown in the figure below.

Selecting one of this will cause the folder to be opened by the explorer appropriate to your platform, such as Windows Explorer in the case of the Microsoft Windows platform.

Starting a terminal session in a project folder

The Outputs tool gives you a way to create a new terminal or console window targeted to one of your project folders. To do this, click the triangle ( ) to the right of the terminal icon ( ). You'll see a list of project folders like the one shown above. Choose a folder and a terminal window will be created and targeted to the folder you selected.

Opening a file mentioned in the external compilation output

You can open a file mentioned in the external compiler output in a specified external editor by selecting the file name and then clicking the send to external editor ( ) button, shown in the bottom bar of the following figure:

If, as is often the case with C compilation errors, a line number is adjacent to the file name, you can select the line number and the file will be opened in the external editor and the cursor positioned at that line number.

View external code for a class/feature

You can view the external code for a particular Eiffel class or feature in an external editor. Pick the class or feature whose generated code you want to see, and drop it onto the button. The external code for the class or feature will be shown in an external editor.

The figure below shows an example of picking the feature make and dropping it on the send to external editor button.

You can also drop a class or feature pebble on the open folder or terminal icon. This will get you to the folder in which the generated code for the class or feature resides.

View external code from the finalized folder

By default the code that you see in an external editor is from the workbench (W_code) folder. You can see the corresponding external code from the finalized (F_code) folder by holding the CTRL key while you drop the class or feature pebble.