An often occuring frustration when testing out an interface is that it will work fine within the interface editor, but once we throw it on a site, something goes wrong. That wouldn't be too big a deal as it's all part of development, but whenever we test interfaces on a site, there is no way to see what values the variables are getting for diagnostic purposes. We can hide/show the components on the site, but is there some way for developers to also see variable values?
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I assume you might have some variables / queries that depend on the user viewing the form. A technique I've developed gradually is, instead of throwing the loggedInUser() function all over your interface(s), is to capture it only once into a local variable and then using that in queries, group membership checks, etc. For debugging purposes, this is a big help because then we can instead temporarily change the "local!currentUser" variable delcaration to refer manually to a username instead of loggedInUser(), and make sure things still work.
Mike Schmitt said:I assume you might have some variables / queries that depend on the user viewing the form. A technique I've developed gradually is, instead of throwing the loggedInUser() function all over your interface(s), is to capture it only once into a local variable and then using that in queries, group membership checks, etc. For debugging purposes, this is a big help because then we can instead temporarily change the "local!currentUser" variable delcaration to refer manually to a username instead of loggedInUser(), and make sure things still work.
100% agree, aside from my debugging hide/show, always always have a local!user: loggedinuser() type variable declared at the top of the interface, and reference local!user throughout (passing to child interfaces as well). Being able to change this to a value in one line for debugging such as local!user: touser("john.doe"), and test, is huge.
My case for loggedinuser() within the debugging only section is so I can throw it on other developers' interfaces that do not have local!user declared for whatever reason.
As an advanced tactic, in some interfaces I define "local!currentUser" like this, to enable myself to throw in an arbitrary username as needed, and switch to it instantly just by commenting out the line with "loggedInUser()".
local!currentUser: a!refreshVariable( value: { loggedInUser(), "throwawayuser823498" }[1], refreshAlways: true() ),
These sound like awesome ideas. I just need to go in and rejigger everyone else's interfaces for it
Thanks for the tips