[OpenLayers-Dev] OpenLayers 'Debug Mode'

[Cameron Shorter]

I think you should include a logging framework into the trunk version of 
mapbuilder, and then provide 2 releases:
* Release A will be the same as before, it all logging functions are 
stripped out. (Use perl or awk or similar).

* Release B will be a debugging release and have all the debugging left in.

Debugging code should look something like:
  Debug.warn(test,"Error message if true");

The Debug framework should allow comments to be outputted as alerts, 
text into a widget, or some other format that we want to use later.


Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> A bunch of times, we've run into problems where the answer has been "It
> would be really nice to let the user know that they are doing something
> which is probably wrong, but we don't have a way to inform them." In the
> past, OpenLayers had fancy debugging tools, the need for which has
> largely been removed by Firebug. However, we oftentimes run into cases
> where a user is doing something that they don't really want to do, but
> they don't know it. 
>
> For example, #248, "Map allows layers to be added twice", is a case
> where a user was adding the same layer to the map twice. The patch I've
> added prevents this from happening -- but there is no way to say to the
> user 'you probably didn't mean to do that'.
>
> Clearly, we don't want to be littering OpenLayers with 'alert'
> statements, but at the same time, it might be nice to have a way to put
> OpenLayers into a 'debug' mode, where these things can be reported to
> the user, either via 'alert()' calls or via console.log() or something
> similar. (I don't want to pull in a full logging framework if we can
> avoid it.)
>
> This mode should not be the default, but an option on the map could
> allow a user to turn it on. The map object could support a 'log()'
> method, which could then report things to the user.
>
> I can't think of the other cases this has come up, but I know they
> exist. What do people think about adding this in -- possibly not for
> 2.4, but maybe for 2.5?  
>
> Regards,
>   


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://lisasoft.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5011
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254