Personas: General topic: Will it be possible to trace/debug along the UI flow?

[Former Member]

Hi Personas experts,

This may be a general question - as developers implement Personas UIs, there are often cases where the new UI does not work as expected, and we don't know what is actually going on along the UI flow. This is even difficult when we use a lot of scripting which causes complex UI actions such as pressing script buttons, copy/paste values among fields etc.

Would it be possible to do kind of tracing/debugging/loging while executing UI in Personas, so that we can see which value is copied/pasted, or which button is pressed by the scripts?

This would greatly help developers to work more efficiently. Please advise about this. Thanks.

Br,

Dong Zhu

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Debugging scripts isn't possible in Personas 2. This is one of the things I find most frustrating with the scripting functionality. Small scripts are fairly easy to build and debug. Large scripts are not. There are some things you can do to make it easier.

The first rule is to build and test scripts is small pieces. Make sure each works before moving on to the next. Put each piece on a separate script button and chain them together by having a script push the button for the next piece. This makes it easy to break a long script in the middle for debugging, without having to delete the whole thing - just remove the appropriate Press step. You can merge all the scripts together once you are done, to avoid all the script buttons. Personally I generally just hide them, so that I easily debug later when something unexpected happens after go-live.

Create temporary text fields to paste data into if you need to see the values being copied around. Combine this with the above technique to watch values as you run through the scripts.

Debugging will get easier in Personas 3.

Steve.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Steve,

Many thanks for your answer. It looks that we have to manually play "tricks" in order to debug. Onething I found "annoying" is that when there are many "Hidden" buttons on a UI, it is really difficult to identify the long button ids in the script (specially the id cannot be displayed completely in the Prop window). I use to place all hidden controls in a Hidden groupbox, and for each hidden button, one can show its id in a label control besides the button. Anyway, one can do what he likes.

Thanks and set yours to Correct.

Br,

Dong

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Yes, lots of hidden buttons get hard to manage, especially if you are not careful about labelling. It can be hard even to tell which buttons are being referenced. I like your idea of creating labels with the object IDs - I might use that myself!

Steve.