FlowFuse / FlowFuse/node-red-dashboard

Ability to enable more detailled logging

Open
#421 5 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
needs-triage type:feature
Dominant language
HTML
Stars
355
Forks
82
Avg merge
4d 20h
Merged PRs (30d)
24

Description

### Description

Hi @joepavitt,

I was wondering last night why my injected messages did not arrive on my heatmap node. After going to the drawing table, my second version of my [cheat sheet](https://github.com/FlowFuse/node-red-dashboard/issues/404#issuecomment-1847899338) made things clear for me. So after a quick fix, I now finally receive messages.

But I have to admit that it is kind of difficult at the moment to find out what is going wrong. For example you cannot easily find a socketio related source file in the browser debugger, because all the libraries are now packaged inside some obscure index-xxxx.js files by Vite. Finally I managed to find and add a conditional breakpoint for my node:

![image](https://github.com/FlowFuse/node-red-dashboard/assets/14224149/089aee2f-5f53-4a41-8f13-ec04388bc2c7)

This way at least I knew that my injected message arrived in my browser.

It would be nice if some day somehow some extra logging could be activated, which are disabled by default to avoid polluting the browser console log. So that you know a message arrives, or that the default onInput of your component will be called, or that there is nothing specified in the data tracker specified for you node (so your message will get lost), and so on... That way you can quickly see in the Developer tools of the browser what you are doing wrong.

Not sure what would be the best way to activate this kind of logging behaviour. Perhaps by injecting a special kind of message into a node, to switch it to trace level? And that you can specify the scope in that message (single node/all nodes)? Or perhaps there is already something related in place in the current dashboard? Don't know...

This is ***NOT*** urgent, but it would certainly help us in the future to develop UI nodes.

Thanks!!
Bart

### Have you provided an initial effort estimate for this issue?

I have provided an initial effort estimate

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

No file or test is named. Start by tracing the browser-side Socket.IO message flow, the data tracker, and the default onInput path, then review any existing logging controls. Define how logging is activated and scoped, and verify that diagnostic events appear in browser developer tools without adding default console noise.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
vite
Domain
frontend, observability
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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