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I encountered a rather obscure IE bug at work this week. After coding up a series of text inputs that enable/disable other radio buttons based on their values, I was dismayed to find out my javascript code wasn’t working in a test environment. I opened Internet Explorer’s F12 Developer Tools to check for any errors.  Unfortunately, the javascript console was useless; nothing was there! No errors, no warnings, nothing. Maybe the console hadn’t recorded an error because it wasn’t open at the time or something, I thought. So I entered another value and found that the javascript was all of a sudden activated! The radio buttons were disabled appropriately and the console was displaying my console.log statements. I was confused. I attempted several other scenarios and variations of input, attempting to lock down what exactly was causing my code to become active. No luck. Fortunately, a colleague of mine had experienced this exact problem before and let me know how to fix it.

Simply remove the console.log lines.

Did you know that console.log does not work in IE unless you have the F12 Dev Tools open?! I sure as hell didn’t. And not only doesn’t work, it breaks other javascript on the page too.

Here is a stackoverflow link that explains the issue in more detail.

So I learned my lesson here, be certain that all javascript debug statements are removed from my code before delivering it.

I am currently working on some front-end items for our Liferay portal. I have chosen to give Liferay’s AlloyUI javascript framework, which is built on top of Yahoo’s YUI framework, a shot.

For some unnecessary reason, I wanted to find out what version of Alloy I was using. I say unnecessary because the Alloy framework hasn’t been updated since 2010! See? This is a disturbing trend I’ve noticed with Liferay’s components. Like, why are its web services written for Axis 1.4?! It was released in 2006, that is positively ancient! One of those “if its not broken, don’t fix it”-type deals, I suppose. …going down a rabbit hole here.

…getting back to the topic at hand. Ever since I watched a screencast on, the now dead, encosia.com, I have been using firebug (and now Chrome’s Developer Tools) to tweak my CSS and javascript on the fly. It also introduced me to using the browser console to actually interact with and modify a web page. The console is also useful for retrieving javascript variables, such as a framework’s version number.

I tried the obvious first:

> AUI.version

“3.4.0”

It worked, but that’s the version of YUI that Liferay 6.1.0 comes with. Not the version of AlloyUI. It took a little bit of exploring, but I managed to figure it out.

AUI.Env.versions

Which, inside Chrome’s console, gave me:

Alloy v 1.5.0

Alloy v 1.5.0

Not perfect, but its clear to see the YUI version of 3.4.0 and the AUI version of 1.0.1.

And now you know a perfectly useless fact about AlloyUI!

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