inspect javascript calls for gmail's buttons - javascript

i'm working on a greasemonkey script for gmail in which it'd be very useful to know what function call is made when the "send" button is clicked. (i was unable to find this using firebug, but am relatively new to javascript debugging.) it seems that one should be able to detect this, i just don't know what tool(s) to use.
thanks very much for any help.
p.s. ultimately the goal here is to be able to extract a unique message i.d. for outgoing gmail messages, which i figured would be present in this javascript call -- so if there's an alternate way to do this, that would work just as well.

Gmail's Javascript code is obfuscated to avoid this type of inspection (and also to reduce code size). It is very unlikely you'll be able to make heads or tails of it even if you manage to get Firebug to breakpoint in the code properly.

I don't think that the message id would be in the message created (in fact all the headers would be absent). My guess is that they are entered on the server side by Google before dispatching the message.

All objects in JavaScript has got a toString() method. If you can find the button then you can find it's associated events. You can then toString() those events in the FireBug console--but as levik wrote; all of the code if obfuscated, so you might just end up toString()'ing gibberish.
Here's a little pseudo-code to get you started:
document.getElementById("...").onclick.toString()
Update
It seems like it's not possible to access events added with attachEvent() and addEventListener() if you have no control over the code you want to debug.

As a sidenote, one would assume that the unique id gets assigned in the server, not in the javascript...

Related

Code in Google Tag Manager does not working

I have a test tasks and 2 from 3 I've done.
But this one I don't understand how and what I need to do?!
I managed to find syntax error:
At first should be:
...function someFunctionName() {...}
or
(function() {...})()
...second it's anonymous function...
TASK:
This script is executed in GTM and implemented in Google analytics by custom Task.
The script sends information about user behavior to Optimozg server and then to Bigquery (bq.php file processes and forwards data). Optimozg server data is coming in correctly, but the data in Google Analytics does not reach.
What is the reason?
How do you fix it?
Hint:
(test the code on your site instance with GTM)
function(){return function(tracker){if("undefined"===typeof tracker.get("BigQueryStreaming")){var f=tracker.get("sendHitTask"),h=function(){function d(c){var a=!1;try{document.createElement("img").src=e(!0)+"?"+c,a=!0}catch(k){}
return a}
function e(c){var a="https://test.optimozg.com/bq/bq-test.php";c||(a+="?tid="+encodeURIComponent(tracker.get("trackingId")));return a}
return{send:function(c){var a;if(!(a=2036>=c.length&&d(c))){a=!1;try{a=navigator.sendBeacon&&navigator.sendBeacon(e(),c)}catch(g){}}
if(!a){a=!1;var b;try{window.XMLHttpRequest&&"withCredentials" in(b=new XMLHttpRequest)&&(b.open("POST",e(),!0),b.setRequestHeader("Content-Type","text/plain"),b.send(c),a=!0)}catch(g){}}
return a||d(c)}}}();tracker.set("sendHitTask",function(d){h.send(d.get("hitPayload"));tracker.set("BigQueryStreaming",!0)})}}}
Not sure why JS devs should know anything about GTM. They typically don't go there.
But yes, to understand how to use the given code properly, just read this article: https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/customtask-the-guide/ it describes what custom tasks are and how to use them.
Ok, so first make a GTM account. Deploy the GTM code on your site. May as well use a local site. Or, rather, have the GTM code being injected by a local extension to a random site that doesn't have GTM yet. Or maybe use a redirector extension to redirect the request for their GTM to yours, up to you.
After that, you just make a tag in GTM that would send a Universal Analytics pageview. GA4 decided not to bother with custom tasks, unfortunately, so UA only. Then you make a trigger on pageview. You assign the trigger to the tag. Don't forget to publish the workspace at least once for it to be testable. Then you preview. Preview is a CTA in GTM in top right corner, near the publish. Basically a neat GTM debugger. Enter the site where you have your GTM snippet deployed/injected. Make sure preview sees your tag firing on page load. That would mean you did the preparation correctly.
We're doing the Hint section here, by the way. Now you need to make a custom javascript variable in GTM, paste the code snippet as is in there. The reason why it wants the code in an anonymous function is because it will run it as a closure on it's own. So they kinda remove the need of the extra ()(). It's mostly done for people who don't know JS, so don't be surprised.
Ok, you've made the CJS var, now go to your tag, and set your customTag exactly as Simo shows in his article:
Good, now publish your container, go to the site where you have it deployed, open the network tab and reload the page.
Inspect the calls to the BQ and Optimozg endpoints. Now what they ask is, I believe, why the original call that is meant to be sent by the tag is not being send. So if you remove the setting of the customTask, then publish and reload the page, you should see a request to the collect endpoint, which is the GA's endpoint for data tracking. If you re-add the customTask code, it will prevent the normal tag's functionality from execution, so no collect call.
What they want to hear from you is how to make the tag fire the original event alongside their optimozg and bq calls.
Most likely, the answer is pretty simple and elegant, but requires a lot of debugging to reach to. Reading Simo's article will help understanding the significance of setting various tasks.
Uh, ok, I didn't mean to really debug it, but it looks like I found the bug. It's in the var f = tracker.get("sendHitTask") It's being used to store the original sendHitTask function, but it never gets used. Why is that? Basically, you just need to call the function in the new sendHitTask function that you set in the last line. I'm not going to debug it in my GTM, but I'm pretty sure that's the issue. It's kinda begging to be found there.
Also, this is not quite a junior JS dev task. It's a senior tracking implementation task. Basically, about $110/hr in Canada and US. Junior JS devs are around $35/hr, I guess. They're just trying to save money, heh. I was thinking of hiring junior JS devs instead of tracking implementators too, but it's hard to teach how data analysis works in all the different tools.

Google Tag Manager and Single Page APP: How to read a DOM Element?

I want to create a variable on my GTM to store a DOM element. I've tried a custom javascript, for example:
function(){
return document.querySelector('.room__price-value').innerText;
}
But nothing, on GTM preview I see always NULL. I think the issue was the single page app.
And I can't involve the programmers.
Any suggestions?
Thanks
Make sure that when in preview, you check the value of your variable on every event on the left.
Make sure when you execute document.querySelector('.room__price-value').innerText; in your console, you actually get the result you're expecting.
Change the code until you get the result in the local console.
Make sure your timing is good, as Eike mentioned in the comment.
What you're doing there seems right. That's pretty much how you do DOM scrape in GTM when front-end devs aren't available. If the suggestions still don't work for you, give us more info on what you're doing, on how your DOM looks like, what your debugging showed and such. As much potentially useful context as you can.

Define custom function in Firebug

I am a chronic user of Firebug, and I frequently need to log various stuff so that I can see what I am doing. The console.log function is a lot to type. Even if I assign it to a single letter variable like q = console.log, I have to do it every time I fire up Firebug. Is there any way to do it such that q always refer to console.log (unless, of course, I override it in my session)?
To answer your question, the functionality doesn't currently exist, however I have found the firebug developers to be very responsive in the past. Why don't you put in a feature request on their forum, or better yet, code it up yourself, and ask them to add it?
Depending on your IDE, simply setup a code snippet (I use Flash Develop, so Tools -> Code Snippets).
I believe this to be a better way than setting up redirect scripts and what not, because it stops the Firebug namespace from being polluted, and makes it easier/more consistent to debug if your debugging breaks down.
The screenshot shows me using Flash Develop, hitting Ctrl+B, then hit enter. The pipe (|) in the snippet indicates where the cursor will be placed to start typing after inserting the snippet.

Programatically retrieve count of javascript errors on page

I'd like to write a test case (using Selenium, but not the point of this question) to validate that my web application has no script errors\warnings or unhanded exceptions at certain points in time (like after initializing a major library).
This information can easily be seen in the debug consoles of most browsers. Is it possible to execute a javascript statement to get this information programatically?
It's okay if it's different for each browser, I can deal with that.
not so far read about your issue (as far as I understood your problem) here
The idea be the following:
I found, however, that I was often getting JavaScript errors when the page first loaded (because I was working on the JS and was introducing errors), so I was looking for a quick way to add an assert to my test to check whether any JS errors occurred. After some Googling I came to the conclusion that there is nothing built into Selenium to support this, but there are a number of hacks that can be used to accomplish it. I'm going to describe one of them here. Let me state again, for the record, that this is pretty hacky. I'd love to hear from others who may have better solutions.
I simply add a script to my page that will catch any JS errors by intercepting the window.onerror event:
<script type="text/javascript">
window.onerror=function(msg){
$("body").attr("JSError",msg);
}
</script>
This will cause an attribute called JSError with a value corresponding to the JavaScript error message to be added to the body tag of my document if a JavaScript error occurs. Note that I'm using jQuery to do this, so this specific example won't work if jQuery fails to load. Then, in my Selenium test, I just use the command assertElementNotPresent with a target of //body[#JSError]. Now, if any JavaScript errors occur on the page my test will fail and I'll know I have to address them first. If, for some strange reason, I want to check for a particular JavaScript error, I could use the assertElementPresent command with a target of //body[#JSError='the error message'].
Hope this fresh idea helps you :)
try {
//code
} catch(exception) {
//send ajax request: exception.message, exception.stack, etc.
}
More info - MDN Documentation

Getting data from the browser's console using javascript

I don't know if this has been asked before, but what i'd like to be able to do is get data from the error console within the browser itself(if it supports it) this would be for when a user sends off a bug report it'd pull up any errors related to pages at my website for things such as typos in code and other things that somehow managed to slip by. Also, in that regard is there a way to pass the errors from the console to a useable format? If this isn't possible, then i could just tell them to copy and paste what came up from the site itself.
I thought of this right now as i was thinking about how to make the bug reporting system run better since the entire thing is basically ran within the browser and for the backend I can easily just look at error logs but for the frontend ie javascript bits of things it's not goign to be as easy.
So to finish wrap all of this up in one little statement, is there an easy way to get the data from the error console and be able to send it along via javascript ie to a form, or something similar.
You can use the onerror event in JS to get the details of the error. Hoptoad do this for example and log the errors to their console, Their code re-uses lots of nice JS scripts including a printStackTrace function that is great.....
You can see how they do it here:
http://hoptoadapp.com/javascripts/notifier.js

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