How can I determine if a particular Java method calls another particular Java method several stack levels down?

Question

So let's say that I have method A and I want to know if kicking off method A could possibly result in method D being kicked off. It's obviously easy to determine if A calls D directly, but is there a way to determine if D is called further down the stack (ex: A calls B, B calls C, C calls D)?

Basically I'm looking to do a recursive search of all method calls with in a particular method to find another specific method call. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

Regards, Brandon

Answer 1

If you have an IDE (like Eclipse or Netbeans), you could put a breakpoint in method D, and then have a look at the stack at that point in the Debug view.

In Eclipse for example, there will be a panel that looks something like this:

^{Image from Eclipse Help}

You can see in the stack that main() has been called.

In your example it might look something like this:

ClassZ.D() line: P
ClassY.C() line: O
ClassX.B() line: N
ClassW.A() line: M

Answer 2

Found the solution ! Apparently I wasn't the only one that came up with this question, I just didn't word it quite the same. Here's the best solution (and it does use the Call Hierarchy in Eclipse, thanks Raedwald!)