JDI Thread Evaluations has encountered a problem

Question

I'm running Eclipse for Java. I created a DOM version of an XML file. Now I want to change an attribute of an element in the file. I called a method that called a method in the class that controls the DOM, and I got a dialog box saying "JDI Thread Evaluations has encountered a problem. Exception processing async thread queue" while debugging.

I'm a relative newbie at Java and have not come across such an error, and I have no idea what's causing it.

If anyone has any suggestions as to the cause of the problem and/or ways to fix it ...

Thanks so much!

Answer 1

Keep an eye on your "Watch" expressions - if you don't need them, remove them all. Sometimes certain watch expressions have caused this error message for me.

This might also explain why it happens to intermittently for people (sometimes they have watch assignments that cause the error, however restarting or removing the right watch can solve the issue without them knowing it.)

Answer 2

The Java Debug Interface (JDI) is part of the Java Platform Debugger Architecture. One apparent way to trigger this exception occurs when an object's toString() method carelessly returns null. You might want to try a different debugger, and it wouldn't hurt to validate your XML. As noted in comments, the problem may appear intermittently, suggesting a thread synchronization problem.

Answer 3

This error occurs quiet a few times when you debugging. You can clean this up by removing all watch statements and all breakpoints and restarting Eclipse.

Answer 4

The problem can also occur if source lookup is incorrectly configured. For example lets say one wants to watch the expression foo.bar(). Now if source lookup is incorrectly configured, the debugger is unable to resolve the binding for expression foo (see this eclipse bug). Then the invocation of .bar() will fail with a NullPointerException.