Print objects when passed into the view

[livtanong]

Print objects when passed into the view

[lhorie]

Being someone who works w/ Angular on a daily basis, I know exactly what you mean, but I'm not much of a fan of adding code to core to support a specific debugging use case. My experience with that technique is that sooner or later you end up forgetting a debug expression in the view and embarrassment ensues.

The easy way to do what you want is to just wrap it in a console.log (or console.dir, or whatever you prefer):

m("div", [
  debugObject().property, // will print properly
  console.log(debugObject()) //returns undefined, but also prints properly
])

It's a bit more explicit and less magic, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I'd rather avoid magic.

[lhorie]

With that being said, this does raise an issue that passing an arbitrary object into a virtual element tree as if it were a virtual element throws non descriptive errors, so I'll flag this as a bug

[livtanong]

wrapping the debugObject() in a console.log throws this error though: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'nodes' of undefined

console.log is a unit function so it returns an undefined, and so in this particular case, the children of the div evaluate to ["string", undefined], and it doesn't seem to handle printing undefined.

The only case I can think of that can make this work is

m("div", [
  function(){
    console.log(debugObject());
    return debugObject().property;
  }
])

And that's just... unwieldy.

[lhorie]

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'nodes' of undefined

Oh, that's a serious bug. Will fix this as soon as I get a chance.

Assuming it does get fixed, does the inline console.log seem reasonable to you, @levitanong ?

[livtanong]

Definitely! Most certainly will be cleaner than what I've been doing with angular.

[lhorie]

The null reference error when passing undefined as a node in a virtual dom tree is now fixed in the origin/next branch and is scheduled to be released in v0.1.1. As a side effect, putting arbitrary objects in a virtual dom tree no longer throws errors either (they just get ignored).