Monitoring execution of an hierarchical visual program such as for debugging a message flow

Abstract

Provided are an execution monitoring tool, a method and a computer program product for monitoring execution of an hierarchical visual program. Execution progress reports are sent to an execution monitoring controller which maps the report data to its own representation of the hierarchical program to determine the current position within an execution program. The hierarchical structure of the program and the current execution position are displayed during execution on a test system. The execution monitoring controller maintains an hierarchical representation of the visual program's structure, builds an execution stack from the execution progress reports, and compares the received reports with the hierarchical representation to determine a current execution position. The execution reports include the current execution status as well as the position within the execution flow. In an implementation of the invention for debugging a visual message flow, which represents a sequence of message processing operations as a set of nodes and connections between the nodes, the execution progress reports include the content and structure of the message during execution and this is also displayed to the user. A set of debug nodes for generating the execution progress reports are preferably automatically inserted in the message flow before executing it on a test and debugging system, and these debug nodes send execution progress reports to a debug controller.