custom diagnostic categories not working in 8.x

[senordhuff]

Hi,

I've noticed since using 8.0 and 8.1 that custom diagnostic categories are no longer working as described in the debugging section of your documentation. We have lots of debugging logic that depends on the ability to define custom categories to use with the dev console. Is this a known issue?

[Isomorphic]

No, no changes in this area, and the built-in categories call exactly the same methods and are working.

[senordhuff]

Ok, it appears that my problem is a bit more specific. Can you please let me know if you are seeing this same problem?

When I enter a custom diagnostic category into the dev console, it is not surviving page refreshes with Firefox 6. I think it was also happening with Firefox 5. So, if I enter a custom category like "Zeta Fund" and set it to Info, it works fine for the current page. But, as soon as I refresh the page of my SmartClient app, the custom category is wiped out and doesn't appear in the drop-down for "Logging Priorities" and I need to re-enter it. This doesn't happen in IE or Chrome, just Firefox.

[Isomorphic]

We're not reproducing this on FF6 (running on Mac OSX).
Steps we took to attempt to reproduce:

1) open the developer console
2) Under "logging preferences" menu, select "More..."
3) In the resultant dialog, hit "Add..." and enter a category name (we used "newCategoryTester"), and set level to "debug"
4) After dismissing the dialog, evaluate isc.Log.logDebug("test", "newCategoryTester");
- result: The 'test' warning appears, logged at level 'debug'
5) Refresh the page. To ensure a real refresh, we quit the browser, restarted, navigated back to the page, and reopened the dev-console.
6) Evaluate the test script again (isc.Log.logDebug("test", "newCategoryTester");)
- result: The test warning appears again. You can also pop open the logging preferences menu, hit "More...", and see the "newCategoryTester" entry in the longer list of preferences.

Can you run through the above steps and see if this works for you - and if so, show us the steps required to reproduce the bug?

Thanks
Isomorphic Software

[senordhuff]

Hi, the test you describe works fine for Firefox when I try it with a sample from your SDK. However, we still have the issue in our environment where this test works with Google Chrome and IE but not Firefox. So, any ideas what could be causing this test to fail with Firefox in our environment? Could it be related to SSL or some caching behavior?

[Isomorphic]

The Developer Console basically sets a cookie to hold preferences, and the cookie is specific to the Developer Console URL. If you haven't tried more than one machine, privacy or security settings in Firefox may be preventing the cookie from working. Or a browser extension such as Adblock could be at fault.

[senordhuff]

Hi, yes, I've confirmed this problem from multiple machines (all windows) with all add-ons disabled with Firefox 6.0.1.

I also cleared all history and all cookies before attempting these steps. I see the "Log" cookie getting created with Google Chrome. But, after clearing all cookies on Firefox and recreating the steps described, there is no "Log" cookie getting created for Firefox on multiple machines. I did see one older "Log" cookie with Firefox before I deleted the cookies.

Any other ideas what could be going on?

[Isomorphic]

Not really. Have you tried this with just the SDK (as opposed to your live app) to eliminate any interference there?

[senordhuff]

Things work fine from the SDK. So, there is something about our environment that is causing problems with Firefox only. We've had other Firefox only problems lately centered around our use of document.domain. Do you think that could be interfering with cookies somehow?

If there is no good answer, do you recommend I just switch over to Google Chrome and start using their Developer tools instead of Firebug? I've been using Firefox as my primary development browser for so long I hate to switch but this inability to use custom categories is a major hindrance.

[Isomorphic]

It's possible document.domain interferes with cookies in some way in the latest Firefox - you might file a bug with them if you want to be able to continue to use Firefox.

However note, you also have programmatic access to log categories and could easily build yourself an interface to store persistent settings, perhaps using the Offline persistence functionality.