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DebuggingTimewasters

Page history last edited by David B 12 years, 9 months ago

BLOGGED!

 

Debugging Timewasters: Trying to find ways of solving problems more quickly

 

Problem: I keep saying "verified" is set to 1, so why isn't this code running?

Answer: Because that's not the only requirement to get to that code. "Submit" also needs to be set (case-sensitive), but instead, I have set "submit" (lower-case "s").

Fix: copied & pasted output of Data::Dumper of $qs right beside code, so I could compare what was being sent with how it was being tested

Lesson: Also, I was getting sleepy. That makes for bad debugging. Walk around a bit and come back to it.

 


 

Problem: device_id's were showing up as 1 or 2 or 8 etc (expecting 5762,12428,etc).

Answer: That's what they freakin' were.

Lesson: Just because something might look a little weird, doesn't mean it isn't so. Check the source of the data first and see if it is correct before considering it a problem.

 


 

Problem: alert() isn't working

Answer: the javascript command is there, the problem is that the javascript comand preceeding it causes an error. It was a focus() method called on a control that doesn't exist.

Lesson: If a javascript command isn't working, you should check the javascript console and also the HTML source. Furthermore, if any component of a program isn't working, check THAT component. No sense in adding debug code to a Perl script when the javascript is failing (at least as a first resort).

 


 

Problem: Does the user have sufficient privileges to see this particular control and perform its function? Code is not always very friendly in looking this sort of thing up.

Answer: In dev, I hard-coded the username to be her if it was initially me:

 

 

if($ENV{REMOTE_USER} eq 'david') {
  $ENV{REMOTE_USER} = 'betsy';
}

 

then I could see the screen from her point of view and saw that she did indeed have access.

Lesson: If the initial problem seems difficult, it might be worth a few minutes trying to figure out if there's an easier way to determine the answer.

 


 

Problem: Script is plugging SYSDATE into records when I have a fixed date I want in there. At the end of the script, I changed the way the script works so that, at the end of processing, I plug the same date into whatever records' AS_OF_DATE field is NULL.

Answer: The problem is that when I changed the script to do this, I never went back and took out SYSDATE so that the records' AS_OF_DATE fields were NULL.

Lesson: I solved this one pretty quickly, but I'm not sure what I could have done differently. There were two parts of the script that needed to be changed and I only changed one part. I guess when I see that setting (foo to bar if foo is baz) isn't working, I should make sure I have set foo to baz first. That seems to be a common theme in slow debugging - assumptions. When you assume...

 


 

Problem: CGI Form submit, script is executed twice

Answer: HTML Validator plug-in for Firefox was making additional requests. I checked the Changelog and they were aware of the bug and it had been fixed. After I upgraded, everything was fine

Lesson: Involving another pair of eyes and another brain helped me greatly. For one thing, the other person involved wasn't experiencing the error, even when hitting my code. That got us to thinking about the browser. Then he sent me a link regarding the plug-in and voila. Also, again I made a bad assumption - that there was a problem with the server, and not the client. I need to start asking myself what I am assuming after being frustrated by a problem. I also need to involve other people sooner.

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