Interactive variable replacment also supported for string commands

[isidorn]

Hello friends, I am from the vscode team and some users are reporting an issue with debugging powershell. More datils can be found here microsoft/vscode#49390

After investigating I noticed that your command SpecifyScriptArgs which is used to substitue values before debugging is returning an array of strings instead of a string. This was never officialy supported, and with the refactoring on the vscode side we are more strict and only allow strings.
Bottom line you should change a cast to array to simply return a string and not an array here

vscode-powershell/src/features/DebugSession.ts

Line 232 in 6c1e30e

return new Array(text);

Make sure that all your commands which are used for launch.json configs are returning strings and not array.

[rkeithhill]

Thanks for the heads up. I'll make this change.

[isidorn]

Great, thanks

[eknraw]

@isidorn @rkeithhill Thank you.

[rkeithhill]

@isidorn @weinand Small problem. We allow the user to delete all the text in the "specify args" dialog box:

The problem is that if the user leaves the input box empty (intending to pass no args), then the debugger never bothers to launch this config. AFAICT, I have no control over this behavior. By this point, our resolveDebugConfiguration has already been called and the debug adapter is never sent the launch request. In our case, empty input is valid input.

[isidorn]

@rkeithhill in that case your SpecifyScriptArgs command should return an empty string '' and I believe everything should work fine. Did you try that out?
This will work since type of empty string is string and this check should correctly pass.

[rkeithhill]

But if the input box is left blank, an empty string is what I see in the debugger and is what is returned to vscode?? I'll double check that tonight. I suspect that is why I had the return new Array(text) code there in the first place.

[isidorn]

@rkeithhill ok please double check and let us know what is unexpected exactly.

[avelis26]

Not trying to be that guy but, I downloaded and installed the latest "stable" build of Visual Studio Code, loaded the PowerShell extension, and tried to execute a PowerShell script with args and it's broken...

Not exactly a "stable" build so I'm wondering if any changes should be made to the deployment pipeline so obvious bugs like this don't find their way into "production". I'm happy to help as I've always wanted to assist in the open source world.

[weinand]

@avelis26 VS Code did not change any specified and documented functionality here. We just closed some undocumented loophole and broke the Powershell extension.
We are sorry about that but there are thousand of extension out there and we cannot test them all against using unspecfied functionality.

[rkeithhill]

@avelis26 Given that this is a UI feature (inputbox) that is used as part of starting up the debugger, it might be difficult to test. But if you can find a way to automate such a test, that would be great! Hopefully, we'll have this fixed and can get out a 1.7.1 maintenance release shortly. We have a few other issues that cropped up in 1.7.0 that need to be fixed as well.