How can I debug external JAR files

Question

I'm using some apache libraries in my code. At the moment I'm hitting a variety of problems that I need to debug. However the problem is when I pass data into one of said Apache libraries, when I try to step into the method call using netbeans it simply does the processing in the background and doesn't step into the code I want to view.

Does anyone know how I configure the IDE so that I can debug the apache code as well? Right now I just associate the JAR's with the project by adding them as libraries.

Answer 1

You need to attach a source jar (eg commons-lang-2.4-sources.jar) to your dependency, instructions here

I should also recommend using Maven2 to manage your project dependencies, I've not used Netbeans for at least 5 years, but both Eclipse & IntelliJ have Maven plugins which will import all your dependencies and link them to sources/javadoc jars automatically.