I'm trying to implement an AVA Unit Test for my mixpanel implementation. To do this, I'm comparing the result of mixpanel.track() where if it returns anything, the track was successful, otherwise, it should be undefined.
I thought maybe it was that it was using a different mixpanel instance so I tried creating a named instance and ensuring that but it was to no avail. I'm also trying the same process but with Amplitude and it seems to be working fine (when I am opted out, the response fails as expected)
I have done this in my components where if
const test = mixpanel.track('event_name', {}) is successful, !!test === true but if I do mixpanel.opt_out.tracking() prior to const test = mixpanel.track('event_name', {}), then !!test === undefined.
Expected behaviour (and the observed behaviour when I use it in my components):
trackResponse === undefined
Observed behaviour:
trackResponse === { event: 'asdf',
properties:
{ '$browser': 'Safari',
'$current_url': 'about:blank',
'$browser_version': null,
'$screen_height': 0,
'$screen_width': 0,
mp_lib: 'web',
'$lib_version': '2.30.1',
time: 1572898982.142,
distinct_id: '[some_id]',
'$device_id': '[some_id]',
'$initial_referrer': '$direct',
'$initial_referring_domain': '$direct',
token: '[token]' } }
where [some_id] and [token] are some distinct values I've deleted.
I don't understand why in the AVA test, I'm receiving a response when normally a failed track() results in an undefined response. Could someone shine some light on this?
Let me know if I need to provide any additional information. Thanks.
I figured it out in case anyone else runs into this issue.
I used a debugger to step into the mixpanel.track() calls and figured out that to see if the user had opted out, mixpanel checks for a property in the localStorage and compares it to see if it's === to '0'. If this fails, it assumes the user has not opted out and carries out the track call as normal.
I guess during the AVA test, it was unable to access this property and assumed the user had not opted out. To fix it, in my call to mixpanel.init(), I added opt_out_tracking_persistence_type: 'cookie' as an option so that my opt_out call was being saved somewhere that the property could be accessed during the test.
I am trying to test a method where one of the thing that it does it lock orientation of screen. Jasmine however is throwing error in the line:
(<any>window).screen.orientation.lock('portrait') saying that undefined is not a constructer.
I even tried not using typescript types and just window.screen.msOrientationLock('landscape') and other window.screen methods but I get same error. I have the _$window_ injected in beforeEach of my tests too.
Testing if it locks is not necessary part of my test so is there some way to skip this specific line or correct this error. Thanks :)
Well it was easy. I had to inject window object and assign it to a global variable in my global beforeEach like this:
$window = _$window_;
Then, the next issue was that the property orientation was not available in the window.screen object unfortunately. I just had to mock it inside my spec like this:
$window.screen.orientation = {
lock: function() { return; }
};
Just had to do this before spying/calling the method which had window.screen.orientation.lock method inside it.
I prototyped Function so that it has a getBody function:
Function.prototype.getBody = function() {
// Get content between first { and last }
var m = this.toString().match(/\{([\s\S]*)\}/m)[1];
// Strip comments
return m.replace(/^\s*\/\/.*$/mg,'');
};
See here for more info.
I tried to test it this way:
console.log(console.log.getBody.getBody());
but received an error: TypeError: console.log.getBody is undefined.
I figured out that maybe this happens because console.log was defined before I actually prototyped Function so I created an empty function x right before the prototyping and tried to call
console.log(x.getBody.getBody());
which worked without a problem. Checking the type of console.log with typeof console.log results in "function". Here's a CodePen to try it out. All of this wasn't really a surprise since it's what I expected except of console.log.getBody to be undefined.
So why does prototyping Function not affect console.log? I'm using Firefox 18.0.1 with Firebug 1.11.1.
This seems to be an issue with Firebug not with Firefox per se. My guess is that Function in Firebug lives in a different scope then Function in your page. (since unlike the other browsers Firebug is an extension , not a built in browser tool)
In fact if instead of Firebug you use the built in Firefox console (Ctrl+Shift+K), your code works perfectly fine.
More information about Firebug internals can be found here
http://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/Firebug_Internals
This excerpt may be interesting
When Firebug is detached from Firefox, open in a new or separate
window, the new window has its own scope. In that scope, a few Firebug
script tags compile to create a connection back to the original
browser.xul window. Most important, chrome.js is unique to each top
level window, but the Firebug object used by the detached window is
the object of the parent browser.xul.
I'm using a jQuery plugin called toggleEdit for inline editing.
Everything works fine when the code is actually used in the page.
However, my test suite fails with the following error:
TypeError: Cannot call method 'remove' of undefined
I tracked it down to be triggered from within the clear method of this particular plugin. Its source file can be found here.
There are two relevant bits in that code:
1- The _init function
self.element.addClass("toggleEdit toggleEdit-edit toggleEdit-edit-" +
self._tag(self.element))
//store reference to preview element
.data("toggleEdit-preview", self.p);
As you can see, when the plugin is first instantiated it uses the data structure on self to store the newly created element.
2- The clear function
self.element.data("toggleEdit-preview").remove();
The clear function then tries to access that structure and retrieve the element. That's when, while inside a jasmine spec, it fails with the aforementioned exception.
Has anyone seen anything similar?
EDIT:
This is my spec, it's the simplest piece of code able to reproduce the error:
it("should update the given attribute on the server", function(){
$('#user-details input, #user-details select').toggleEdit(); //this line triggers the error
});
http://alz.so/static/plugins/toggleedit/jquery.toggleedit.js
I was taking a look at the source for toggleEdit and it seems that the only 2 times the function clear is called is just before self.element.data gets set:
if (typeof self.element.data("toggleEdit-preview") !== "undefined") {
self.clear();
self.disableEvents();
}
And at destroy function:
destroy: function() {
var self = this;
self.clear();
self.disableEvents();
$.Widget.prototype.destroy.apply(self, arguments);
}
Since the first call seems to be protected, I ask you a somewhat dumb question: Is it possible that destroy is being called twice?
Found my problem: old version of the jQuery + jQuery UI duo. Upgrading them resolves the exception.
I have a bunch of console.log() calls in my JavaScript.
Should I comment them out before I deploy to production?
I'd like to just leave them there, so I don't have to go to the trouble of re-adding the comments later on if I need to do any more debugging. Is this a bad idea?
It will cause Javascript errors, terminating the execution of the block of Javascript containing the error.
You could, however, define a dummy function that's a no-op when Firebug is not active:
if(typeof console === "undefined") {
console = { log: function() { } };
}
If you use any methods other than log, you would need to stub out those as well.
As others have already pointed it, leaving it in will cause errors in some browsers, but those errors can be worked around by putting in some stubs.
However, I would not only comment them out, but outright remove those lines. It just seems sloppy to do otherwise. Perhaps I'm being pedantic, but I don't think that "production" code should include "debug" code at all, even in commented form. If you leave comments in at all, those comments should describe what the code is doing, or the reasoning behind it--not blocks of disabled code. (Although, most comments should be removed automatically by your minification process. You are minimizing, right?)
Also, in several years of working with JavaScript, I can't recall ever coming back to a function and saying "Gee, I wish I'd left those console.logs in place here!" In general, when I am "done" with working on a function, and later have to come back to it, I'm coming back to fix some other problem. Whatever that new problem is, if the console.logs from a previous round of work could have been helpful, then I'd have spotted the problem the first time. In other words, if I come back to something, I'm not likely to need exactly the same debug information as I needed on previous occasions.
Just my two cents... Good luck!
Update after 13 years
I've changed my mind, and now agree with the comments that have accumulated on this answer over the years.
Some log messages provide long-term value to an application, even a client-side JavaScript application, and should be left in.
Other log messages are low-value noise and should be removed, or else they will drown out the high-value messages.
If you have a deployment script, you can use it to strip out the calls to console.log (and minify the file).
While you're at it, you can throw your JS through JSLint and log the violations for inspection (or prevent the deployment).
This is a great example of why you want to automate your deployment. If your process allows you to publish a js file with console.logs in it, at some point you will do it.
To my knowledge there is no shorter method of stubbing out console.log than the following 45 characters:
window.console||(console={log:function(){}});
That's the first of 3 different versions depending on which console methods you want to stub out all of them are tiny and all have been tested in IE6+ and modern browsers.
The other two versions cover varying other console methods. One covers the four basics and the other covers all known console methods for firebug and webkit. Again, in the tiniest file sizes possible.
That project is on github: https://github.com/andyet/ConsoleDummy.js
If you can think of any way to minimize the code further, contributions are welcomed.
-- EDIT -- May 16, 2012
I've since improved on this code. It's still tiny but adds the ability to turn the console output on and off: https://github.com/HenrikJoreteg/andlog
It was featured on The Changelog Show
You should at least create a dummy console.log if the object doesn't exist so your code won't throw errors on users' machines without firebug installed.
Another possibility would be to trigger logging only in 'debug mode', ie if a certain flag is set:
if(_debug) console.log('foo');
_debug && console.log('foo');
Hope it helps someone--I wrote a wrapper for it a while back, its slightly more flexible than the accepted solution.
Obviously, if you use other methods such as console.info etc, you can replicate the effect. when done with your staging environment, simply change the default C.debug to false for production and you won't have to change any other code / take lines out etc. Very easy to come back to and debug later on.
var C = {
// console wrapper
debug: true, // global debug on|off
quietDismiss: false, // may want to just drop, or alert instead
log: function() {
if (!C.debug) return false;
if (typeof console == 'object' && typeof console.log != "undefined") {
console.log.apply(this, arguments);
}
else {
if (!C.quietDismiss) {
var result = "";
for (var i = 0, l = arguments.length; i < l; i++)
result += arguments[i] + " ("+typeof arguments[i]+") ";
alert(result);
}
}
}
}; // end console wrapper.
// example data and object
var foo = "foo", bar = document.getElementById("divImage");
C.log(foo, bar);
// to surpress alerts on IE w/o a console:
C.quietDismiss = true;
C.log("this won't show if no console");
// to disable console completely everywhere:
C.debug = false;
C.log("this won't show ever");
this seems to work for me...
if (!window.console) {
window.console = {
log: function () {},
group: function () {},
error: function () {},
warn: function () {},
groupEnd: function () {}
};
}
Figured I would share a different perspective. Leaving this type of output visible to the outside world in a PCI application makes you non-compliant.
I agree that the console stub is a good approach. I've tried various console plugins, code snippets, including some fairly complex ones. They all had some problem in at least one browser, so I ended up going with something simple like below, which is an amalgamation of other snippets I've seen and some suggestions from the YUI team. It appears to function in IE8+, Firefox, Chrome and Safari (for Windows).
// To disable logging when posting a production release, just change this to false.
var debugMode = false;
// Support logging to console in all browsers even if the console is disabled.
var log = function (msg) {
debugMode && window.console && console.log ? console.log(msg) : null;
};
Note: It supports disabling logging to the console via a flag. Perhaps you could automate this via build scripts too. Alternatively, you could expose UI or some other mechanism to flip this flag at run time. You can get much more sophisticated of course, with logging levels, ajax submission of logs based on log threshold (e.g. all Error level statements are transmitted to the server for storage there etc.).
Many of these threads/questions around logging seem to think of log statements as debug code and not code instrumentation. Hence the desire to remove the log statements. Instrumentation is extremely useful when an application is in the wild and it's no longer as easy to attach a debugger or information is fed to you from a user or via support. You should never log anything sensitive, regardless of where it's been logged to so privacy/security should not be compromised. Once you think of the logging as instrumentation it now becomes production code and should be written to the same standard.
With applications using ever more complex javascript I think instrumentation is critical.
As other have mentions it will thrown an error in most browsers. In Firefox 4 it won't throw an error, the message is logged in the web developer console (new in Firefox 4).
One workaround to such mistakes that I really liked was de&&bug:
var de = true;
var bug = function() { console.log.apply(this, arguments); }
// within code
de&&bug(someObject);
A nice one-liner:
(!console) ? console.log=function(){} : console.log('Logging is supported.');
Yes, it's bad idea to let them running always in production.
What you can do is you can use console.debug which will console ONLY when the debugger is opened.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/console/debug