Debugging Edit Page

Debugging Ember and Ember Data

Here are some tips you can use to help debug your Ember application.

Also, check out the ember-extension project, which adds an Ember tab to Chrome DevTools that allows you to inspect Ember objects in your application.

Routing

Log router transitions

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window.App = Ember.Application.create({
  // Basic logging, e.g. "Transitioned into 'post'"
  LOG_TRANSITIONS: true, 

  // Extremely detailed logging, highlighting every internal
  // step made while transitioning into a route, including
  // `beforeModel`, `model`, and `afterModel` hooks, and
  // information about redirects and aborted transitions
  LOG_TRANSITIONS_INTERNAL: true
});

View all registered routes

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Ember.keys(App.Router.router.recognizer.names)

Get current route name / path

Ember installs the current route name and path on your app's ApplicationController as the properties currentRouteName and currentPath. currentRouteName's value (e.g. "comments.edit") can be used as the destination parameter of transitionTo and the {{linkTo}} Handlebars helper, while currentPath serves as a full descriptor of each parent route that has been entered (e.g. "admin.posts.show.comments.edit").

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// From within a Route
this.controllerFor("application").get("currentRouteName");
this.controllerFor("application").get("currentPath");

// From within a controller, after specifying `needs: ['application']`
this.get('controllers.application.currentRouteName');
this.get('controllers.application.currentPath');

// From the console:
App.__container__.lookup("controller:application").get("currentRouteName")
App.__container__.lookup("controller:application").get("currentPath")

Views / Templates

Log view lookups

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window.App = Ember.Application.create({
  LOG_VIEW_LOOKUPS: true
});

Get the View object from its DOM Element's ID

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Ember.View.views['ember605']

View all registered templates

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Ember.keys(Ember.TEMPLATES)

Handlebars Debugging Helpers

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{{debugger}}
{{log record}}

Controllers

Log generated controller

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window.App = Ember.Application.create({
  LOG_ACTIVE_GENERATION: true
});

Ember Data

View ember-data's identity map

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// all records in memory
App.__container__.lookup('store:main').recordCache 

// attributes
App.__container__.lookup('store:main').recordCache[2].get('data.attributes')

// loaded associations
App.__container__.lookup('store:main').recordCache[2].get('comments')

Observers / Binding

See all observers for a object, key

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Ember.observersFor(comments, keyName);

Log object bindings

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Ember.LOG_BINDINGS = true

Miscellaneous

View an instance of something from the container

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App.__container__.lookup("controller:posts")
App.__container__.lookup("route:application")

Dealing with deprecations

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Ember.ENV.RAISE_ON_DEPRECATION = true
Ember.LOG_STACKTRACE_ON_DEPRECATION = true

Implement a Ember.onerror hook to log all errors in production

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Ember.onerror = function(error) {
  Em.$.ajax('/error-notification', 'POST', {
    stack: error.stack,
    otherInformation: 'exception message'
  });
}

Import the console

If you are using imports with Ember, be sure to import the console:

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Ember = {
  imports: {
    Handlebars: Handlebars,
    jQuery: $,
    console: window.console
  }
};

Errors within an RSVP.Promise

There are times when dealing with promises that it seems like any errors are being 'swallowed', and not properly raised. This makes it extremely difficult to track down where a given issue is coming from. Thankfully, RSVP has a solution for this problem built in.

You can provide an onerror function that will be called with the error details if any errors occur within your promise. This function can be anything but a common practice is to call console.assert to dump the error to the console.

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Ember.RSVP.configure('onerror', function(error) {
  Ember.Logger.assert(false, error);
});

Errors within Ember.run.later (Backburner.js)

Backburner has support for stitching the stacktraces together so that you can track down where an erroring Ember.run.later is being initiated from. Unfortunately, this is quite slow and is not appropriate for production or even normal development.

To enable this mode you can set:

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Ember.run.backburner.DEBUG = true;