I can't seem to find an answer to this seemingly simple question. I have an app that i've built using the command line phonegap tools and when i start this app it opens up. i am using something called ios_sim (https://github.com/phonegap/ios-sim) which launches the app in the simulator and does not launch xCode (i don't quite understand why this is a feature, it seems like xCode has some useful tools)
Anyhow, my app is not functioning the same way that it does in the browser and i need to debug it. I have also already installed Charles to inspect the requests and i can verify that the correct data is coming from my API so my assumption is that there is some sort of javascript error in rendering the page (the page is partially rendered btw).
All i want to do is view the javascript errors. the same way that you would in the console if you were looking at a web page.
how do you do that?
You have to use Safari Remote Debugging with Web Inspector. See in the relating cordova docs how to do that!
Related
Any ideas here? I am using Google Polymer with Vulcanize in order to comply with Google's Content Security Policy and not use any inline Javascript in my index.html file, but while it appears to work on Android, it is broken when I try to run it in an iOS emulator.
Is there some iOS specific thing with external javascript files that I should know about? Or any ideas as to why this is happening? Any documentation or something would be helpful, I am only slightly familiar with iOS.
Even a way to get some sort of debugging screen working with xcode would be lovely. I'm using the cordova log plugin to try to get my console.logs to do anything, but nothing is showing up, so I'm just inferring that my external javascript isn't loading.
We've just been developing an update for our iOS application where we need to open up a web view and display a web page hosted on a 3rd party site. This has worked locally when building directly to a device using xCode, the application works as expected; the web page loads and we can interact with it as expected. However, if we build the application and deploy to test flight, on the same device the webview functionality no longer works. Everything else works as expected but when the webview opens it just stays blank - the web page doesn't load/display. It's the same device, the same code base and same 3rd party link, so the only difference is the provisioning profile we're using (dev vs ad-hoc). Looking in application services I can't see any thing that looks like we should be setting (in fact our dev/ad-hoc provisioning profiles have the same settings). We are looking to see if there is any event we can hook into to get more detail but the application isn't crashing. Has anyone come across something similar before or point us in a direction/area that could help throw more light on the problem (might be searching for the wrong thing, but not found anything on google / stackoverflow).
In the end this appears to be down to a difference in the execution of the code when built and when deployed (maybe deployed is faster). We traced that all the relevant calls were being made using Charles proxy and looking in somme logging we had running on the web server. To try and find out where the code was getting to we added "alert boxes" - with these in place both versions displayed the web page correctly (locally built and deployed through test flight). As we couldn't leave the alert boxes in :) the solution was to move where we set up the web call and also to programmatically create the web view, rather than using one attached to the XIB. Still haven't got to the bottom of what exactly was happening.
I have run into several problems with iOS development through phonegap recently, and unusually people around here have been unable to discuss these issues and even together we have (for the first time I have ever seen) not had a single comment or answer for these topics...
See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14707936/make-a-page-that-redirects-back-to-ios-phonegap-app and iOS broswer data -> Cache & Cookie for Phonegap App / Session?...
However, I have found "solutions" to get around these, but its by no means answers to the issues in question which are still outstanding... just simply doing it a completely different way.
However, despite loosing web-view in phonegap, in an attempt to get around https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14707936/make-a-page-that-redirects-back-to-ios-phonegap-app I now have some issue that are outstanding...
I need to be able to navigate back to my App from the web-system !!!
However, I have no idea how. I have read info on creating URL Schema, but I am not sure if this is even possible through build.phonegap at all... and it seems faily complicated. Does anybody know of a way for iOS safari to do one of two things
Either
Open the app that is running in the background
or
close the current browser tab and navigate back to the app in the background.
The closing tab idea would be good, but not essential
Look forward to everyone thoughts and opinions on this one...
Henry
You can create an url scheme for any application you make yourself.
See tutorial here
It's not as terribly complicated as one would think, and the required objective-c code is minimal.
Once you have done this, you can use your own url scheme to launch your phonegap application from safari with a hyperlink.
This would not close the tab (you could do this with javascript if you wanted to)
but does put safari in the background, and opens your phonegap app.
(whether it is already running in the background or not)
It is even possible to pass data to the app using your url scheme.
It is not currently possible using PhoneGap Build in 2.2 and previous. Potentially a feature top be released in newer versions of Cordova/Phonegap
So iOS6 is out, horrah. Now, it appears as though Apple have removed the 'Developer Console' that used to exist in Safari. Great, I hear a lot of people say - it was limited.
But, it works on the device - now apparently you have to connect the device to a Mac to get web inspector?
Is this the only way of debugging with console? Is there a way of debugging with windows, safari? Please note, I don't mean just changing user-agent, which you can do on Safari Windows - that doesn't register touch events - just click.
If you don't have Mac OSX you can use this script as console replacement:
https://github.com/robotnic/waterbug
It shows error message, it's possible to log all kind of variables, you have to turn your iPhone or iPad 90° to the right to open the console.
A poor mans debugging console:
try {
var test = document.do.something();
}
catch (exc) {
alert(exc);
}
One can debug on the device by using bookmarklets (especially within Mobile Safari).
Debugging on the device can be very important if an error only appears live on the device but nowhere else. There is a variety of bookmarklets for developer, so choose the tool of your choice (e.g. Firebug Lite), add it to your bookmarks and use it right where you need it.
This may not be the Developer Console, but it is a method to debug much more accurate and job-oriented.
I wrote a blogpost on how to use bookmarklets on my weblog (there is also a list of other common testing tools and further bookmarklets):
http://hofmannsven.com/2013/laboratory/ios-bookmarklets/
UPDATE: Chrome released its Mobile DevTools which will make debugging (within Google Chome Mobile, Android Devices only) much easier. This will not fix the missing DevTools issue within Safari, but it might help to locate errors on a device:
https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/remote-debugging
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/mobile/
UPDATE2: Mozilla released a Firefox add-on to enable web development across browsers and devices: http://youtu.be/kEFbQwB81RE?t=1m58s
Have a look for weinre. It allows you to inspect a page running in Safari from another computer using a Chrome-like web inspector
You can use window.onerror to debug errors without a console. Simply add this code to your HTML document in its own <script> tag before any other Javascript code:
<script type="text/javascript">
window.onerror = function(e){
alert(e);
};
</script>
This will do so that whenever there is an error, the error message will be shown in an alert dialog box, which is visible in iOS Safari. It's important that the above code runs before the error you're trying to debug, and if you're debugging a syntax error, it's also important that it's in a separate <script> tag.
Instead of Safari on Windows you could use an app by Telerik called AppBuilder. I've found the instructions on this blog. You'll need to get an account to use the Telerik Platform though.
This will give you dev tools like the ones in Safari. I've used it on Win7 64 bit with regular web apps and Phonegap apps running on an iPad with iOS 7.1.
Like neno suggested, Telerik AppBuilder is a great applications. I am actually running Windows XP in a virtual machine on Linux only for the purpose of debugging my iPhone. Windows XP because in my case Windows 7 does regognize the iPhone, but iTunes and Telerik AppBuilder don't.
Looks like the built in console is gone. I tried plugging into a Windows 7 and opened Safari and could not locate the developer console. Then I read this article which confirmed it.
If you need to be able to test your site in both orientations then waterbug is not a good option, because it uses up the landscape orientation for its console view.
One decent option is to use Adobe Edge Inspect. You open your site on Chrome and open the app on your device and your device will mirror whatever page you have open on your desktop. Then you can use the Chrome dev tools to debug your content.
I've been doing lots of work in getting a few web apps to work offline on iOS using the HTML5 manifest. I've ran across the typical problems everyone else has and fixed them and everything seems to be working fine—except in the case where I save the web app to the desktop on my iPhone 4.
If I do this and then enable airplane mode, I get the following alert when trying to access the app via the home screen: "your-app-name could not be opened because its not connected to the internet." Accessing the app via Safari browser works fine while offline.
If anyone knows if this is an error on my part, or even the slim possibility of a work around, do tell.
Even downloading the new Financial Times web app (very well done with extensive localStorage support) results in an error when accessing it offline from the home screen.
Technical specs: Running iPhone 4 with iOS 4.3.3 (but also saw the issue in 4.3.2)
After reading the comments (especially Rowan's) I ran more tests and found the answer:
No, Apple did not disable HTML5 offline capability for web apps saved to the home screen, it works - for the most part. There is a bug that will make it not work. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with your manifest setup (unless perhaps it downloaded a bad manifest or incomplete manifest at one point.) We don't know how widespread it is but the fix is to clear your Mobile Safari Cache.
Here's the steps:
Close the web app (make sure its not sticking around in the background).
Cleared Mobile Safari cache: Settings > Safari > Clear Cache
Reopened the app (for caching).
Close the web app again (make sure its not sticking around in the background).
Enabled "Airplane Mode": Settings > Airplane Mode
Reopened the app.
It should now work offline. If it doesn't then its probably a separate manifest issue in your app. Looks like a weird bug with the browser cache - or perhaps the cache was completely full? Who knows, but that's the answer. Thanks guys.
iOS seems to be very sensitive to load issues when offline.
I was getting your "could not be opened" error when offline on a page I was working on. The problem turned out to be that the page created an iframe pointing to a site that didn't have an AppCache. Removing those iframes fixed the issue.
In my case, I handled it using window.navigator.standalone which tells you whether you're running in an iOS homescreen app. The code looked like this:
if (!navigator.standalone) insertFrames();
add this to your html:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170201180939/https://jonathanstark.com/blog/debugging-html-5-offline-application-cache?filename=2009/09/27/debugging-html-5-offline-application-cache/
I found it massively useful - even though I've created my manifest file and compared it to other people's manifests this JavaScript debugging script gave me the clue I would have never found otherwise. I apparently had syntax error in my manifest ... long story short I had to remove everything and add the paths to each file/image one by one. The end result was the same however it worked... how weird!!! does whitespace / comments affect the syntax of the file?